What I am looking forward to in Gutsy Gibbon

With the release of the beta version of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) a couple days ago I thought it was worth spending some time writing about what I saw as the highlights in this new release, from a desktop user perspective as well as from a server administrator perspective.

On the Desktop

More Important

thunderbird 2.0.0.6

A great mail client gets better. Some notable features include message tagging, find as you type searching, improved security and junk mail tools, and a number of bug fixes.

pidgin 2.2.0

It will be nice to finally move beyond the beta of gaim 2.0 and onto the final, though renamed, product. Also, most importantly for me this release should mark the first time I don’t have to rebuild the package to enable SILC support. I have been told that this is the case for debian lenny and hopefully the same will be true for Ubuntu Gutsy.

polipo 1.0.1

A program probably very few people have heard of let alone used. This version of polipo has been running on my home machine in conjunction with tor. While it still does not fully meet my needs for a local machine proxy server it at least has the performance aspect down. The earlier versions couldn’t speak socks and therefore couldn’t forward to tor. This version can and it’s good to see it available without compiling.

smplayer 0.5.20

I came across smplayer while trying to debug some audio playback problems. After installing it I’ve gradually come to prefer it over other video players, including my previous pick: kaffeine.

swfdec 0.5.1 (libswfdec0.5-1, swfdec-mozilla)

While just how useful swfdec will be remains to be seen it is undeniable that this is a huge upgrade from version 0.3.6 in Feisty and earlier. I’m not sure why version 0.5.2 didn’t make it into gutsy.

nspluginwrapper 0.9.91.4

This is the first release where nspluginwrapper is present. Given that gnash and swfdec may not be competent for most user’s flash needs this can come in handy on amd64 systems for installing flash. I’m not sure why version 0.9.91.5 didn’t make it into gutsy.

apparmor 2.1

Installed and loaded by default; no more compiling modules like under Feisty. This should make it easier for users to begin to take advantage of the security provided by apparmor.

Less Important

KDE 4

Well, even thought KDE 4 is still in beta I’m anxious to try it. I don’t know how well it will work in gutsy but there is a lot to look forward to in this new release including lighter memory usage, better performance, a new file manager instead of Konqueror, and more.

Compiz Fusion

Yes I want to try out the eye candy. I even have a system powerful enough for it I think.

kismet

I’m just hoping this version works better for me than the feisty version.

openoffice.org 2.3.0

Nothing that really wows me in the new release but a lot of solid improvements.

gimp 2.4

I don’t use The Gimp very often but I have read much about this release and its significance. I look forward to playing with it a bit.

gnash 0.8.1 (gnash, gnash-common, mozilla-plugin-gnash)

I wish more effort was being placed into a flash replacement so there could be native support on AMD64 systems. Alas, last I tried gnash it just wasn’t up to the task. Still it’s good to see progress and I do look forward to testing the new version.

On the Server

More Important

apparmor 2.1

Even more important to the server user than the desktop user is the inclusion of apparmor modules in the Ubuntu kernel. This should greatly help system administrators test and deploy apparmor to enhance the security of their systems.

shorewall 3.4.4

I generally use shorewall to create firewalls for both servers and desktops. Major updates usually bring helpful features.

Less Important

apache2, posgtresql-8.1, posgtresql-8.2, mysql-server-5.0, lighttpd

I’d be remiss to mention that these important packages have all received minor updates in gutsy.

snort 2.7.0

Snort gets a major update from 2.3.3 to 2.7.0. Combined with BASE this could drastically improve intrusion detection.

acidbase 1.3.6

BASE is actually the successor to ACID. It is a php front end for analyzing data from Snort