All hail the Karmic Koala

If you don't know who (er, what) Karmic Koala is, I will gladly educate. Karmic Koala is the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 release, which came out October 29, 2009. With all the press talking about Windows 7, this latest update from Canonical has all but been lost in the noise.

But fair enough. Why should you (or anyone) care?

Believe it or not, for most purposes (that is, the purposes most people put to their computers) Ubuntu Linux works quite well. Web browsing (Firefox), email (Evolution, Thunderbird, etc.), Word Processing (Open Office), music (scads of apps, but Rhythmbox is very popular). It even comes with a torrent peer, ZIP/RAR file tool, PDF display tool, and the list of available applications certainly doesn't end there. The really cool thing is that all these applications are cost free. You ain't got to pay anyone a dime to use 'em. Contrast that to Windows. The lack of any need for virus protection, alone, should make a difference.

Just today I installed Ubuntu Karmic Netbook Remix on my netbook, and though getting everything set up again has taken most the afternoon, I'm basically quite pleased with the new look. My ongoing objective is to keep the netbook lean, clean, and relatively uncustomized in order to make future upgrades smoother and simpler.

One new feature is Ubuntu One, which is 2GB of "free" cloud storage integrated into Ubuntu. That would be fine with me, except: 1) it's not encrypted, and 2) the file upload blew up both times I tried it. Maybe I'll try again later, but so far it doesn't look very promising. Stay tuned, I may post more as I have more to post.