the.countdown.begins

It's October once again and another Ubuntu release is due (don't you just loved the predictable release cycle?) I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 8.10 beta a.k.a. Intrepid Ibex and will be testing it as soon as its finished. I'm actually very satisfied with the previous release (Hardy Heron) but I'd also like to see what the new release will put into the whole Ubuntu experience table. Aside from tons of bug fixes (and bugs to uncover, since this is beta) a slew of new features are added into Ubuntu. Some of the more notable improvements are (based on Ubuntu.com):

• X.Org 7.4. Which bring better support for hot-pluggable input devices and at the same time allow the greate majority of users to run without a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. This ensures that users spend more time using the system rather that fixing it. A new failsafe X is introduced, to give better tools for troubleshooting X startup failures...I'd wish better support for dual screen monitor btw. Also fglrx (thats ATI folks) and two of the older nvidia binary drivers are not available for X.Org 7.4 yet, so users of these drivers will be automatically switched to the corresponding open source drivers.
  
• Linux kernel 2.6.27. Better hardware support and bug-fixes obviously
• Encrypted private directory. Support for an encrypted secret folder in your home directory. Nice!
• Guest session. The User Switcher panel applet (package fast-user-switch-applet) now provides an extra entry for starting a Guest session. This creates a temporary password-less user account with restricted privileges: the account cannot access any users' home directories, nor permanently store data. This is sufficiently safe to lend your laptop to someone else for a quick email check.
• Network Manager 0.7. Includes system wide settings (i.e., no need to log in in order to get a connection) and management of 3G connections (GSM/CDMA). I just hope it works out of the box.
• "Last successful boot" recovery entry. Ubuntu 8.10 will retain a copy of your running kernel and make it available from the boot loader as a "Last successful boot" option . This makes it possible for old kernel packages to be safely auto-removed by the package manager, instead of being kept indefinitely(and eating disk space).
• DKMS. allowing kernel drivers to be automatically rebuilt when new kernels are released. This makes it possible for kernel package updates to be made available immediately without waiting for rebuilds of driver packages, and without third-party driver packages becoming out of date when installing these kernel updates.