The Buzz On the New Ubuntu
As noted here, the official release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, is due this week. In addition, many people are already using the beta releases, and, at ThisisTheCountdown.com you can track the minutes and seconds leading up to the next major release of Ubuntu, and get QR codes and URL strips. Version 11.10 has already generated a lot of discussion, including both praise and criticism. Here are some of the early reports.
"Another new addition in Oneiric Ocelot that could be particularly useful for small business users is Deja Dup, a full backup facility that now comes as a standard part of the software. Using Deja Dup, business and individual users can back up either locally or to the Ubuntu One cloud. They can also schedule backups and restore from a backup, providing “time machine” capability."--PC World
"Juju is a next generation service deployment and orchestration framework. It has been likened to APT for the cloud. With juju, different authors are able to create service charms independently, and make those services coordinate their communication through a simple protocol. Users can then take the product of different authors and very comfortably deploy those services in an environment. The result is multiple machines and components transparently collaborating towards providing the requested service.”--Canonical
"As a die-hard Ubuntu 10.10 user, I was less than blown away by the newest version, Ubuntu 11.10. The addition of the new Gnome 3 shell in Ubuntu 11.10 forces a paradigm shift in your computing habits. That does not mean that nothing good is included in the newest Ubuntu release, though. File-sharing and personal cloud storage just got a whole lot more convenient."--TechNewsWorld
We provided a top-to-bottom look under the hood at the new Ubuntu version in this post. As you can see from the above comments, there are positive and negative reactions flowing in, and there is a lot of focus on Ubuntu's new cloud capabilities.
As we reported here, Ubuntu 11.10 includes Mozilla's Thunderbird as its default email engine, replacing Evolution. This single change may be disruptive for many users, but if you've used Thunderbird in the past and had problems with it, it has improved a lot
Business users can peruse an update from Canonical on the new version's capabilities aimed at them, here. Meanwhile, individual users can look into this missive from Canonical, which includes discussion of Ubuntu One and how to use the 5GB of free storage that it provides.