De zeer gebruiksvriendelijke en op Debian gebaseerde Linux-distributie Ubuntu is door de ontwikkelaars voorzien van een vierde alphaversie in de 6.04 reeks. Deze uitgave heeft 'Dapper Flight 4' als codenaam meegekregen met de status van UVF. Deze status geeft aan dat de packages die momenteel aanwezig zijn ook aanwezig zullen zijn in de final release. Er zijn wel een aantal uitzonderingen zoals Gnome 2.14 en Espresso waarvan momenteel bètaversies worden gebruikt. De ontwikkelaars hebben het volgende te vertellen over de veranderingen in Dapper Flight 4:
It has been a very exciting development cycle thus far. Dapper has seen many improvements including a new graphical installer splash using gfxboot, a new kernel version with special builds for various types of servers, speed improvements all around, and new versions of all sorts of software. This week brings us Dapper Flight 4, the fourth alpha release of Ubuntu 6.04 - The Dapper Drake. Dapper Flight 4 is the product of over 3 months of tremendous effort to mold the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer into a coherent easy to use whole. The most significant milestone for Dapper Flight 4 is the UVF (Upstream Version Freeze). Aside from a few exceptions such as GNOME 2.14 and Espresso, most of what is in Dapper now is what will be in the final release in April. Let's take a look at what you are going to get.
Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April of 2006.
UVF - The Upstream Version Freeze
The Upstream Version Freeze is the point in the development cycle when Ubuntu stops accepting new upstream versions of software or packages. This allows the Ubuntu developers time to stabilize the current software in Ubuntu and helps avoid introducing new bugs.
More Installer Splash Improvements
A few additional tweaks have been made to the gfxboot installer splash theme. The options have been shifted up just a little bit to allow more space for the installation menu options. There is now preliminary support for activating assistive technology features from the initial boot screen (although the code implementing these boot options does not yet exist it will in the near future)
GDM Improvements
After your Ubuntu machine has finished booting the first thing you are greeted by is GDM, the login screen. This first screen should be as simple and friendly as possible. The GDM Theme has been improved upon and simplified by hiding all of its options in, that's right, one single "Options" menu. This configuration puts all the options into one organized menu simplifying the overall look and feel of the log in screen.
New Old Notifications
Here is a prime example of why Open Source software and specifically GNOME and Ubuntu rock so hard. In the previous flight a new notification bubble was implemented on the GNOME desktop. Many users expressed their dislike of the feature and so it was changed. The Ubuntu developers listened to the opinions of its users and took their advice. Dapper now uses the original more professional looking style for the notifications.
Example Content
Flight 4 includes some example content files for the key applications in the standard Ubuntu install. The current package includes some wallpapers from the ArtworkTeam and some clipart from [WWW] openclipart.org. We also need productivity and multimedia files, so content contributions are welcome.
LiveCD
As we saw in Flight 3 the Live CD now supports persistence allowing your live environment changes to be saved and later restored. With Flight 4, the boot menu has been improved and the Live CD now includes a graphical installation system called Espresso.
GNOME 2.14 Beta 2
The GNOME hackers continue to grind away on GNOME 2.14 which is now in the UI Freeze of their development cycle. In addition to all the impressive speed improvements in GNOME 2.14 there have been many user interface improvements made as well. Below are some of the more notable improvements since the previous release.GNOME Terminal
Other Applications Highlights
The GNOME Terminal is where many of us spend a great deal of time hacking on our projects. The GNOME Terminal has had tabs for a while now but there was never a way to close a tab with a single mouse click, until now. The GNOME Terminal now has 'X's on its tabs providing a quick and easy to use UI element to close individual terminal tabs.
GEdit
GEdit is a great little text editor with a very clean, simple and easy to use interface. But don't let its pretty face let you think it is soft on the inside. GEdit is a very powerful development tool as well, with features like syntax highlighting and more. In order to show off its power and usefulness GEdit now has a new MDI interface that allows you to optionally display Python and shell script output from within its own interface.
Yelp
Yelp, GNOME's help documentation viewer has received a lot of attention recently which has lead to many improvements. The most notable improvements are dramatic speed increases and the ability to search the available documentation. Documents that sometimes used to take up to 30 seconds to display now display in under 2 or 3 seconds. Searching, a much needed feature, allows you to search all the available documents helping you get the help you need faster and easier.
Ekiga Softphone (was GnomeMeeting)
Ekiga, which was formerly known as GnomeMeeting, is a VoIP (Voice Over IP) Internet softphone. From Egika's About Dialog: "Ekiga is full-featured SIP and H.323 compatible VoIP, IP-Telephony and Videoconferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with SIP and H.323 hardware or software."
GNOME Screensaver
No more xscreensaver. Dapper now uses the shiny new GNOME Screensaver.
GNOME Power Manager
Ubuntu 6.04 now also includes the GNOME Power Manager application installed and active by default. The GNOME Power Manager allows you to control the power saving features of your machine via a nice clean and simple interface.
Rhythmbox 0.9.3.1
Rhythmbox 0.9.3.1 brings with it many bug fixes and additional stability for all of its great new features such as Podcasting support, Ratings, Recent Activity, and much more.
X-Chat GNOME Notifications
X-Chat GNOME also uses notifications. If X-Chat GNOME is running in the background and someone pings you, you will get a nice little notification pop up in the bottom right corner of your screen. The notification displays what channel the message is comming from, the person who sent the message and the message itself.
In addition to all the great new features that are installed by default on Ubuntu 6.04 there have been improvements to just about every software package in the entire distribution. These include applications in all of the main, universe and multiverse repositories. Below is an overview of some of the more notable additional software updates.The GIMP 2.2.10
A Very Special and Early Gift - Xgl and compiz
The GIMP 2.2.10, the advanced picture editor, is now in Ubuntu 6.04. Although GIMP 2.2.10 is largely a bug fix release it marks a very important milestone for the GIMP. The GIMP is 10 years old. Happy Birthday GIMP!
GStreamer 0.10.3
GStreamer 0.10.3 is now the default multimedia framework for Ubuntu 6.04. gstreamer 0.8 is still available for applications that require it although it is not installed on your system by default. The major benefit of this is that the entire desktop now uses the same new and more stable multimedia framework across all applications.
Thunderbird 1.5
The latest version of the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird email client, version 1.5, is in Ubuntu 6.04. Thunderbird 1.5 includes advanced junk email filters, anti-phishing protection, excellent security and much more.
MoinMoin Wiki 1.5.0
MoinMoin is the wiki that powers https://wiki.ubuntu.com/. Version 1.5 of this powerful wiki is readily available for easy installation in Ubuntu 6.04. Some of the major new features of MoinMoin 1.5 include a GUI wiki page editor and the ability to render a wiki page as DocBook XML. Once a page is rendered in DocBook XML it can be easily transformed into virtually any other document format.
Novell engineers have been working on some amazing 3D desktop effects. They have released their work to the community and that work has made it into Dapper. Xgl and compiz are very experimental. They are only available in the universe repository. There is no guarantee that they will even work for you. With that said, if they do work for you on your hardware the effects are breathtaking. The effects rival and in many cases exceed what Mac OS X and Windows Vista are capable of.
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