Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” released

Ear­li­er today, Canon­i­cal Ltd. announced the avail­abil­i­ty of the lat­est release of the world’s most pop­u­lar GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion, code­named “Oneir­ic Ocelot”.

Ubun­tu 11.04 is the fif­teenth incar­na­tion of what start­ed out as an ambi­tious fork of Debian sev­en years ago. Canon­i­cal, the com­mer­cial spon­sor of Ubun­tu, has man­aged to push out a new ver­sion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem twice a year for near­ly three quar­ters of a decade now. Ubun­tu 11.10 super­sedes Ubun­tu 11.04 (Nat­ty Nar­whal) which was released back in April, on the same day as our Spring Fundrais­ing Gala.

There’s a lot to like in Oneir­ic Ocelot. Uni­ty, the desk­top envi­ron­ment intro­duced in Nat­ty, has received some seri­ous pol­ish, mak­ing it sig­nif­i­cant­ly eas­i­er to use. Uni­ty now has a grace­ful 2D fall­back mode, for com­put­ers with­out mod­ern graph­ics cards or 3D-capa­ble dri­vers. The menus have been some­what reor­ga­nized to be more intu­itive, and music search is now built in to the desktop.

Oneir­ic is also the first release of Ubun­tu to fea­ture Mozil­la Thun­der­bird as the default email client — a very wel­come change if you ask us. (Gnome Evo­lu­tion is still avail­able to users through the repositories).

Ubun­tu ships with Lin­ux 3.0 as its ker­nel and is built on top of GNOME 3.2. Major appli­ca­tions like Libre­Of­fice have also been updat­ed to the lat­est sta­ble ver­sion, with the notable exclu­sion of Mozil­la Fire­fox (which was already at Ver­sion 7 pri­or to the release of Oneir­ic; Fire­fox switched to a fast released cycle fol­low­ing the release of Nat­ty Narwhal).

“Ease of use, styl­ish­ness and key tasks such as safe web surf­ing, doc­u­ment shar­ing, office pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and per­son­al clouds for music, files and pho­tos are cen­tral to the Ubun­tu expe­ri­ence.” said Jane Sil­ber, CEO of Canon­i­cal, in a release high­light­ing the improve­ments in Oneir­ic. “That’s why Ubun­tu is now a glob­al phe­nom­e­non — not just for sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors, devel­op­ers and expert users, but for a grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of home users that want a sim­pler, safer way to use the PC.”

Canon­i­cal has set up a real­ly nifty live tour of Ubun­tu on its web­site, where you can expe­ri­ence Ubun­tu from with­in your brows­er thanks to the mag­ic of JavaScript. If you’ve nev­er tried Ubun­tu, you might want to con­sid­er check­ing out the tour.

Of course, today is also release day for Ubun­tu’s deriv­a­tives, includ­ing Kubun­tu, which we use. Kubun­tu 11.04 ships with Ver­sion 4.7.1 of the KDE Soft­ware Com­pi­la­tion and includes a great many refine­ments. KPack­ageK­it, the old pack­age man­ag­er, has been replaced with the new Muon Soft­ware Cen­ter, and Dol­phin, the KDE equiv­a­lent of Win­dows Explor­er, has a clean­er default look.

The Kick­off menu (KDE’s equiv­a­lent of the Win­dows start but­ton) also incor­po­rates bread­crumb nav­i­ga­tion for eas­i­er brows­ing of applications.

I’ve already upgrad­ed one com­put­er from Kubun­tu 11.04 (Nat­ty) to Kubun­tu 11.10 (Oneir­ic) and it was just about the most pain­less upgrade I’ve ever run. KDE SC 4.7 is a sol­id, sta­ble desk­top envi­ron­ment that puts the user in the dri­ver’s seat. It is ful­ly cus­tomiz­able and easy to use.

As far as per­for­mance goes, I like what I’ve seen so far. Appli­ca­tions open faster and there is zero lag when mov­ing in between win­dows or workspaces.

It’s been very excit­ing over the last few years to watch Ubun­tu and Kubun­tu mature. GNU/Linux on the desk­top has nev­er been more appealing.

If you haven’t tried Ubun­tu (or Kubun­tu), con­sid­er down­load­ing Oneir­ic Ocelot 11.10 and going for a test dri­ve. You do not have to make any changes to your com­put­er to try Ubun­tu — it’s so pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble that it can be run from a CD or DVD, or a USB stick. (This is what’s known as a live installation).

If you even­tu­al­ly decide you want to install Ubun­tu to your hard dri­ve, you can do so with­out dis­plac­ing Win­dows, if you like.

Hap­py downloading!