Today, I have been playing around a bit with the new version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 6 release. As expected the release itself is not very stable and broke my Ubuntu install in a lot of places including compiz fusion. I was expecting an Alpha release to act like this so I installed it on one of my several “test machines”, where I can go crazy with it without having to worry about breaking something. If you plan to try out the any alpha release, please don’t try it on your main machine. Under normal circumstances, when there is a new release of Ubuntu, you can just pull up your synaptic package manager and you will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version. In case of Alpha or Beta releases, you will have to manually upgrade from an existing install from the terminal with: sudo update-manager -d

In case you were wondering, the above screenshot is not how Intrepid Ibex looks like in the last Alpha Release or will look like in the final release, this was used as a default theme in one of the earlier Alpha releases of ibex; but after a lot of complains from die-hard Ubuntu fans, they had to remove this theme as default, even though it was never meant to be permanent. In their own words, it was something they were “trying out”. At first I was very skeptical about this look, but soon I got used to it and still use it in some of my installs. I believe the latest Alpha release still looks like the default hardy Heron theme. If you are interested in this theme add this entry to your package source list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kwwii/ubuntu hardy main

I stole the wallpaper from here.

So what changed on this Alpha release? Nothing much in terms of the way it looks, it’s very much expected (by some) for Ubuntu Ibex to still have the same default look as Hardy. There are a lot of design ideas flying around, but I don’t think there is enough time before the next release to implement any of these proposed looks. I would love to be proved wrong in this case.

New Gnome!

However, under the hood there are a lot of changes going on; including the usual bug fixes, latest Linux Kernel (2.6.27), Latest Gnome (2.23.91), Encrypt private directories and Dynamic Kernel Module Support; among many other things. To view a laundry list of features being worked on, check out the Intrepid blueprint.

If you are feeling adventurous and really don’t mind if your system breaks down, download the ISO and try it out yourself.