First Look at Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Beta

“We’ve covered bits and pieces of what’s coming up for Ubuntu
9.04 in the past few months, such as Mac/Growl-like notifications
(that you can grab now, if you want), some stylish community
themes, and the speedier ext4 filesystem.

“One feature I couldn’t show in the screenshots was the improved
boot time in Jaunty. Having lived in it for about a week and
installed a few apps, it took 24.9 seconds from choosing my OS to
boot in Grub to a login window, and about 19 seconds more to get to
a fully-loaded desktop (about 43 total).

“What’s below are screenshots taken from the last alpha version
before it. If Jaunty’s release schedule holds (and it almost always
does), a final release is just a month off. Ubuntu’s beta releases
are usually pretty close to the final thing, though, and it’s easy
enough to download an ISO file, then live-boot and test it without
harm using UNetbootin from Windows or Linux.”

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