Somewhat quietly under the radar of Apple's and Microsoft's "Big news" came the scheduled release of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal. First off: what's with the name? Some will know that Canonical has had a trend of setting a release once every 6 months. The first number is the year - 12 for 2012; while the second number is the month - 10 for October. Each release has had a "code name" that consists of an adjective and an animal. In the beginning, there was no pattern (Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake) Generally folks will refer to the adjective (I'm using Quantal, or Lucid, for instance). Following Dapper, every release has moved one up in the alphabet.
Ubuntu formerly used, by default, the Gnome desktop environment. Windows users who made the change did not see a dramatic difference. With Natty, though Ubuntu left Gnome for Unity, which had formerly been the desktop for the netbook version of Ubuntu. I eventually would make a lateral move to Xubuntu, which uses Ubuntu, but replaces the default desktop with the Xfce desktop environment. Geeks will get this, others will have a blank look. In shorthand, I found a version that was simple enough to deploy through the household with minimal need to really retrain folks on what was going on...
We move up to the release of Quantal a week and a half ago. I was the first one to install it, here. I didn't see a whole lot of difference at first. In addition, I must admit to a bit of "operator error" in first tinkering about. First off, most things seemed to work just as well as before. Unfortunately I had some problems with Samba, in which it would not see my network. Also Thunar (Windows users can liken it to Windows Explorer) was giving something strange. All extra HDD's have been showing up in double. The other significant problem I had right away was functionality of VirtualBox. Between beta testing, recreational scam baiting, and experimentation, I have been making good use of Oracle's VirtualBox for some time. Upon my upgrade, though, my virtual machines were not accessible.
Enter the entropy of Operator Error into the system: In trying to get both Samba and VirtualBox behaving as intended, I made a careless error, which stripped a lot of things from my OS. Fortunately, I had both the system disk for recovery, plus the clarity of thought to not screw things up further. So, my next few days were spent more making sure I had the programs I needed/lost rather than playing around with this to its capacity. Net personal file loss: 0.
With one week of use, I've found little difference in feel between Xubuntu 12.10 and 12.04. Progressivley, Synaptic Package Manager is being replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center, but for the most part a lot has remained the same, but "cleaned up". I still have yet to resolve the Thunar issue or the Samba problem. I'm hoping to be able to take a bit of time to address those issues. Also, I have been having a problem with VirtualBox's compatibility. Likely these will be resolved through patches, as I am not the only one who seems to have the same problems.
While it is good to keep with the latest, I wouldn't push to jumping from Precise to Quantal at the moment, as it seems there are a few significant bugs to be worked out of the system. Precise, as a LTS edition will be maintained for several more years than Quantal, so there is no problem sticking with it a bit more. Some of this may be due to the change of DE,. Since I have not played with this in the Unity environment as yet, I'm unsure, and would not like to "mis-speak" on this.
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