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Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Makes a First Appearance
srimadman writes "The Alpha 1 Release of Ubuntu 11.04, often known as 'Natty Narwhal,' is intended as a developer snapshot of the next major Ubuntu version, which is due in April."
So, if you want to try Unity and Wayland before your neighbors do, this is the time.
As an option, yes, but not as the default X server. You can expect it to be really buggy right now, though.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Installer crashes and burns, at least when run under VirtualBox, it complains one of the packages is malformed and then crashes.
Not sure if the installed OS is runnable after this, it might be but I didn't want to mess around with it, I'll wait for Alpha 2.
The release numbers are "year.month".
Is it really that hard to include a link to Ubuntu's official Alpha 1 page, http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/alpha1 ?
Yes, apparently. Natty Narwhal Alpha 1
And they would be reimplementing large portions of X's job by doing so. So instead of a known common protocol that is consistent with a few implementation problems, you have a whole new untested drawing system that is GTK specific too... great.
Well it's not like DRI is untested, it's being used by drivers today to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL. It's more that now everyone talks OpenGL rather than the X protocol. The upside is a greatly simplified display server, the hardware (or the software fallback) does all the rendering and compositing. This makes Linux work like a modern desktop same as OS X or Win7 with every application a hardware accelerated 3D client. The downside is that what works locally - send everything to the graphics card and let the hardware work it out - works terribly over the network as you go from an extremely wide pipe (PCIe x16 mostly) to whatever the network/internet speed is.
To be honest I think remote applications need a simpler rendering protocol, it's just not realistic to have an application look the same across a 56k dial-up link as it does locally where a thousand shaders can process 1 GB of textures to render something. Either you go down the VNC route and display the output our you need a simplified protocol which is better covered by web applications or some more "real" remote application protocol. X is neither, from what I gather most rendering toolkits no longer use the X primitives because they're too primitive, so they render it and send it as pixmaps anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings