Friday, September 28, 2012

Kubuntu 12.10 beta2 is out

The Beta2 release of Kubuntu was released yesterday. The iso file is quite large - about 1GB, so you will not be able to burn it to blank CD, instead a blank DVD should be used.
My favorite way is to write it out to the USB flash dongle using simple command in konsole:

sudo dd if=kubuntu-12.10-beta2-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc

where /dev/sdc is the device for my USB flash dongle.

The download location is here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/quantal/beta-2/

The installer went smoothly in my Virtual Box, though I noticed the window corners are a bit roughly and unpolished. Hope they will fix them, despite they were the same in 12.04.1

After installation desktop run with compositing effects already enabled. BTW Kwin is the most adwanced and smooth window manager I ever seen.

What's new? The first, of course is new newest KDE 4.9. The second is the use of LightDM - not so bad looking. I personally like it more than old KDM, which is somewhat boring.

Next big and long awaited improvement is the ability to navigate with arrow keys after searching in start menu. This feature was missed in 12.04 and now, thanks to the devs and the god, is present in the new 12.10.

Kubuntu 12.10 also sports new Gtk Configuration center for better integration with Gtk application.


It looks a bit unfinished and IMO, it is not a big deal at all. The old one worked fine too.

There is also a ton of new application from the huge SC (KDE Software collection), and most notable is the inclusion of Caligra office suite and OwnCloud client for OwnCloud 4 for opensource file sync and share solution.


I haven't tested Caligra yet, but I'm going to take a look and I'll write soon a small review for it.


Another plus (not specific to Kubuntu only) is the adoption of GCC 4.7 which is promising for better performance - in about 10-15% faster. The kernel was updated too - currently at version 3.5.


Among other cool features and improvements, there is a bug which is not fixed yet. The bug is about KWin and Chromium Browser. When clicking on browser tabbar and the window was previously maximized, the KWin assumes this action as window move and demaximize the window. Very odd.

Thats all, while waiting for the final release lately in October, I'm still running my old Kubuntu 12.04.1 with updated KDE 4.9 as I described here.

Enhanced by Zemanta

0 comments:

Post a Comment