(UPDATE: We have some impressions and screenshots of the BETA of Ubuntu 10.10. Maverick Meerkat HERE.)

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1 is here! Well, since yesterday at least. It took me a full 30 hours to download the 32bit ISO *glares at router* but finally I have the chance to fire it up in a VM to get a sneek peak at what we can expect.

I am sure the people working on this release are painfully aware of the implications of a release number of 10.10, no failures will be tolerated in what has already been dubbed the 10/10 (ten out of ten) release.

What is it like then?

This is an Alpha Release

Be warned, Alpha releases are VERY early development snapshots. Maverick Alpha 1 is no different – there are plenty indications that you are not working on a finished product at all. The theme is the Lucid theme, and the installer displays a graphic that says “Thank you for choosing Ubuntu 10.04…”

If you want to play with Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1, do so at your own risk. I always try Alpha releases in a VM first, and then decide if I want to go through the development cycle by installing it on hardware somwhere. I used Intrepid Alpha as my default work OS way back, but living dangerously like that is not for the faint hearted.

No Gnome 3

I see that we are still in Gnome 2 land. A lot of people expect Gnome 3 to feature in Maverick Meerkat, but since the release of Gnome 3 will be so short before the Maverick release date, there are still uncertainties.

Reading through the Maverick Blueprint list on Launchpad, I found the following;

Work items for maverick-alpha-3:
test the new gnome-panel version in a PPA and decide by alpha 3 whether to use:

So it seems that a decision will only be made by Alpha 3 if Gnome 3 will be used, for more information you can log into launchpad and read the blueprints for Maverick Meerkat.

Other Changes

Maverick Meerkat sports the 2.6.34-5.12 kernel, Evolution has been upped to the 2.30 version, The newer Gnome release of 2.31 is included according to the Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1 page, but when I checked in the live environment I spied version 2.30 accoring to the “About Gnome” menu.

Reading through the blueprint list I also picked up that Chromium will be “a” default for Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I am not sure if this means that Firefox will be dropped though…

Maverick Alpha 1 still uses EXT4 as well.

Summary

Alpha releases are tricky. I tried installing Maverick Alpha 1 in a VM, but it crashed. I will give it till Alpha 2 then reassess my decision to install it on my laptop, or not.

Maverick Meerkat – Expectations are high, lets hope it lives up to them.

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