Top 3 Jaunty Jackalope New Features

Posted by Shane Tuohy in Linux on Apr 20th, 2009 | View Comments

jaunty_jackalope It’s that time of the year again, when we are treated to the latest Ubuntu release. As per usual you have all the latest Gnome packages and little tweaks here and there, but here are the 3 features I am most looking forward to.

1. New Notifications

Ubuntu now has a new notification system. you know, that thing that tells you when you are low on battery, change volume etc.

It looks lovely, really slick and smooth, but don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself, go ahead, I’ll wait…

See that??? Look lovely, can’t wait

2. Boot time improvement

One of the focuses of this Ubuntu release is to improve boot time, something Microsoft Vista could learn from..

This is a clever thing to focus on at the current time as more and more people are using netbooks and small MID devices, which don’t have the power of full PC’s, and therefore boot times can be painfully elongated. Ubuntu is clearly targeting these small form devices with the new release.

So is it effective? Well it appears so! I haven’t installed the beta onto my laptop, because of the bad experience I had last year so I can’t vouch for it, but it looks promising.

3.EXT4 support

This one has a friend of mine all a flutter, the main advantages of ext4 are that it can support volumes up to 1 Exabyte in size, and single files of size 15 terebytes. You may laugh and say that this is nonsense, but give it time till we have super de duper HD x4 and we’ll see file sizes get larger!

A directory can also contain more than 32000 entries, which was the limit in ext3

The main improvement is speed though, and if you really want the fastest possible Ubuntu experience, use ext4, you won’t regret it.

So thats it, roll on the 23rd!