[sf-lug] First look at Ubuntu Natty

[Bobbie Sellers]

  Kevin this might do for your news item

and if you want to you can send it to the list.



  First look at Ubuntu "Natty" and the state of Unity

February 14, 2011

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier 
<http://www.dissociatedpress.net/>.

Ubuntu's 11.04 release ("Natty Narwhal") is going to be an important 
inflection point for the project, and for Canonical. The company is 
banking on its users, and potential users, embracing a user interface 
(Unity <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity>) that differs significantly from 
the previous Ubuntu release as well as other familiar desktop UIs. 
Further, the target release date is less than three months away and 
significant chunks of the Unity interface are still unfinished. The 
second alpha release on February 3 
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2011-February/000820.html> 
shows promise, but there is significant work left to be done.

[Unity] <http://lwn.net/Articles/427947/>

The most interesting, or at least most visible, change is in the shift 
to Unity. Canonical began work on Unity during the 10.10 cycle 
<http://lwn.net/Articles/387757/> for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Despite 
the less-than-exuberant reception for Unity on 10.10, where some vendors 
opted to remain on 10.04 for netbooks 
<http://carlrichell.com/post/2611217155/the-system76-starling-netbook-to-remain-on-ubuntu>, 
Canonical decided to push ahead and make Unity the default shell 
<http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/shuttleworth-unity-shell-will-be-default-desktop-in-ubuntu-1104.ars> 
in 11.04 rather than adopting GNOME Shell from GNOME 3.0...


<http://lwn.net/Articles/427883/>