It’s only part-way through the development cycle for Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” but already, some fairly interesting changes are being made. I’m not talking here about the “Big Things” such as the proprietary drivers and codecs issue, or the composite by default specification, but rather the packages that make up Feisty’s repository.

Big Things

First, of course, are the major packages. In Ubuntu’s case, this is Linux 2.6.20 and Gnome 2.18. The 2.6.20 kernel has a number of advantages over 2.6.17, in particular, I’m interested in the ibm-acpi module being merged into the kernel. Gnome 2.18 brings in some changes as well. One controversial change is the GNOME Control Center, which replaces the nested Preferences and Administrations menu. While it is a nice interface, it makes getting to a few important utilities, such as Synaptic, too difficult. Also a part of the new Gnome, NetworkManager is now installed by default on Ubuntu. This is another change that has sparked some controversy, as while NetworkManager is a very good tool for some users, such as myself, for other users it doesn’t work at all for some reason or another.

New packages

More interesting are the packages that are new in Feisty. In no particular order, those are:

• Deluge, a bittorrent client written by myself and another ubuntuforums.org member. Deluge 0.4.0 is currently in Feisty’s universe repository.
• Filezilla, a classic FTP client from windows. The new version 3 is cross-platform.
• Audacious, a fork of Beep, which was a fork of XMMS.
• Frozen Bubble 2, a new Frozen Bubble game that adds network and internet play.
• Prevu, an automated backporter, is in Feisty’s repository.
• Exaile, a GTK+ Amarok-like music player.

New Versions

Of course, there are also newer versions of some of my favorite applications, most of which I’ve built with Prevu.

• XChat is now version 2.8.0.
• Java 6, which will soon be GPL’ed, is now available.
• OpenOffice 2.1.
• Flash player 9 is installable.
• VLC is now at 0.8.6 final.

Beta Versions

Another set of apps are those that are still in beta versions. A couple of these are in Feisty, such as Gaim 2.0beta6, while other programs, such as Thunderbird, are still at their old version although a beta is available. Hopefully, both Gaim and Thunderbird will be able to put out final 2.0 releases in time to make it into Feisty.

Anyways, these are just some of the changes I’ve noticed among the packages that I actually use, there are certainly even more exciting new programs in Feisty’s repository than what I’ve mentioned here.

I’m going to try and wait for the official release before switching over, but waiting until April is going to be hard.  Right now, I have Feisty running in a virtual machine, which has allowed me to see what changes have been made.