The Ubuntu team has announced the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10 and its variants, including Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu. The final release of Ubuntu 7.10, dubbed "Gutsy Gibbon," will happen sometime next month.
Today’s beta release gives a glimpse of some of the features slated for next month’s final release — GNOME 2.20 and the default installation of NTFS-3g, which provides read/write access to Windows (NTFS) partitions are probably the biggest new features.
The Ubuntu 7.10 desktop beta also features Compiz Fusion, the 3-D window manager and desktop effects package, as well as improved printer support in GNOME with printers automatically configured as they are connected.
Other new features include support for Flash through the Gnash project, an open source Flash player. Given that Gnash is experimental and only supports Flash 7 and below, most users will probably want to stick with the proprietary plugin from Adobe. Of course, Gnash does offer at least partial Flash support to 64-bit desktop systems.
There’s also a new method of installing Firefox plugins in Ubuntu. Ubuntu now supports automatic installation of popular plugins through the standard Ubuntu package repositories. Given that Firefox does a pretty good job of checking and updating plugins, I’m not sure what the huge advantage of having them in Ubuntu repositories is exactly, other than it provides a one-stop update mechanism.
Other variants of Ubuntu have improvements as well, most notably Kubuntu 7.10 beta features the new Dolphin file manager, which we’ve written about before.
If you’d like to try out the new betas head over the Ubuntu beta download page, but bear in mind these are pre-release offerings and may have bugs and other issues.
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