Intrepid Ibex Alpha 2 was released for download on the 12th of July. Here I am, writing a blog entry using an Alpha Release.

And I must say, judging on first impressions I am impressed.

Now if you have followed my blog, you will know that I am not an early adopter – not by a long shot. The earliest adoption that I indulged in was installing Hardy Heron a week after it was released. Why the jump to install Intrepid Alpha 2?

The decision to download and install Intrepid Ibex Alpha 2 was based largely on my general disappointment with the Hardy Heron. To Me Linux signifies real progress in Operating Systems, and Ubuntu is supposed to bring this progress to the masses. Hardy fell short of this goal, in my modest opinion, and I am hoping that Ubuntu will bounce back with Intrepid.

Intrepid does not ship with a Live Disk, yet, and I downloaded the Alternate Install CD ISO.

I took my old P111 laptop that I tend to use for these kinds of things out of mothball and popped the disk in the drive. I decided to let Intrepid resise the hard-drive that Hardy was installed on, and was pleasantly surprised when everything went smoothly. It took extremely long to install though, more than two hours – but eventually the CD popped out of the drive and the Lappy rebooted.

The GRUB menu appeared and I hit enter. And about 30seconds later I was presented with the logon screen. I was almost alarmed. I had read that one of the aims with Intrepid Ibex was to boot faster. Now Hardy was no slouch, and Intrepid ups the ante, and then some.

The Logon Screen is identical to that used for Hardy, and I honestly don’t mind – it is pretty enough to stick around for a release cycle or so. After entering my Username and Password I was prepared to wait a while before the desktop became useable. After all this is one for the tricks Windows XP pulled to boot quicker. Get to desktop quickly and then plod around for a few minutes while everything that is actually useful gets loaded.

Not so with Intrepid Ibex. There was a momentary pause before the desktop was loaded, and all applications were available almost immediately.

For a moment I was nonplussed though – I thought I had loaded the Hardy Desktop instead! You see, I had customised my Hard Theme heavily, and the Intrepid theme looks almost Identical at first glance. Add to that the default Hardy Heron desktop background and you will agree that one might get confused.

Below is what you see when you log in for the first time.

The new theme is a winner. Needs some work, but I like the idea that the Ubuntu team is exploring new ideas. The Chocolate Brown makes some window functions a bit hard to discern at first, but I bet that the team will fine tune the theme for the release in October.

Below is that window borders look like, I decided to open Firefox for this purpose – Intrepid sports the final FF3 release – and you can see that the default loading page for FireFox is the one you get with Hardy Heron.

Plodding around the Intrepid Desktop I loaded the correct drivers for my Radeon Screen Card, set the resolution and tried to enable desktop effects. Still no joy. It seems that the decision to disable Compiz Fusion on Laptops with ATI graphics has remained the same.. A hack will be needed to enable Compiz Fusion on these machines since apparently there is a problem with the ATI drivers.

Here’s hoping that the situation will soon be sorted out.

Tooling around the interface I detected a certain zippyness that had been lacking in previous releases of Ubuntu. I don’t blame Ubuntu for this – my laptop has seriously limited specs – but I am pleased that Intrepid seems to handle limited hardware a lot better than previous releases.

The software selection is largely similar to that offered by Hardy – OpenOffice Base is missing again – and there are a few additions that I have not noticed in Hardy. One of them is an Encryption and Keyrings utility that should take most of the pain out of creating and sharing PGP keys.

So to conclude this short preview – It is telling that I was able to write this, edit the images displayed in this entry with the Gimp, tool around the interface, surf the Web while writing and open a few applications to check their functionality – in an Aplha release – and be able to post this without running into any snags.

Well Done, Ubuntu Team. This might very well be the Ubuntu I dreamed of having with the Hardy Heron.

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