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New Features

There are new elements to Ubuntu 8.10. The distribution has seen general updates to all the major components, most notably, Gnome 2.24 desktop which is where the user will see the changes in the desktop.

You can now access a range of BBC content from the desktop. Both Totem movie player and Rhythmbox audio player have the ability to browse BBC content from within their user interface and play it back on the desktop. The user interface part works, but on our desktop system, Totem's playback of video flickered constantly if we had average visual effects enabled. Once we turned off visual effects, Totem was able to play video flicker free, but this is far from ideal. Also, the BBC content seemed to have some issues; as all the BBC news video links shown in Totem went to the same, silent, footage of the Channel Tunnel.
The Totem Movie player plays some BBC content, but not what we selected

Canonical claims to have improved and expanded the 3G data support in 8.10. Connecting to 3G should be easier, whether using a 3G dongle, built-in 3G modem, a tethered phone or a connection to a phone by Bluetooth. We tried the latter connection first and failed to configure it; there appeared to be no way tell the network manager there was a paired Bluetooth phone configured. Trying with a USB cable tethering the phone was much more effective; Ubuntu detected and identified the phone and allowed us to select a provider and quickly set up a 3G phone connection which, when tested delivered 1Mbps download rates.

We also tried Ubuntu 8.10 on the EEE PC 901. The running problem with the EEE PC is support for the Wi-Fi network and this version was no different with no apparent support for the 901's Wi-Fi. Unlike earlier versions, the wired Ethernet connection worked and did allow us to download and use Array.org's alternative kernel which resolved many of the issues including enabling the Wi-fi. What we did to install Linux on the EEE PC 901 is included at the end of this article. Once installed, Ubuntu 8.10 was fine; suspend/resume and guest sessions worked, Totem didn't flicker with visual effects enabled, and 3G was still easy to set up.

There is another problem with Ubuntu 8.10, at least according to Phoronix, which benchmarked Ubuntu 8.10 and compared it with versions going back to 7.04. The company concluded that there is, in many cases, lower performance in more recent versions of Ubuntu. These apparent performance changes could be down to changes in the underlying Linux Kernel with new scheduling mechanisms and other changes aimed at making Linux more efficient in a larger number of usage scenarios. The changes could be making the benchmarking return inaccurate numbers, or may reflect a more balanced allocation of resources within the system.

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