Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

I have been testing the new distribution of Canonical, Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, since October 10, the day which was launched.

There are no many features in this release, but I think that Kubuntu goes on improving over and over. Now, we have got a new kernel, 2.6.35, and a new version of KDE, 4.5.1.

On the desktop, we can make out a new style for the system tray and a new Ubuntu font by default.




KPackageKit have been improved too, and now, we can filter the applications by categories, such as Accesibility, Developer Tools, Internet, etc. and for example inside Internet, we can choose Chat, File Sharing, Mail and Web Browsers.




We can also appreciate a new web browser, Rekonq, which reminds me to Google Chrome.




When I comment a new release of Kubuntu, I like to measure the boot time of the operating system on my laptop. In Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, it was 12 sg for the power on (to the kdm screen) and shutdown (from the desktop). Now it is around 9 sg for both.

Finally, also note that I had a little problem at work with the upgrade process... My computer is behind a proxy and I supposed that configuring the proxy URL (ProxyHTTP parameter) into the KPackageKit configuration file (PackageKit.conf) it would be enough... I was wrong, there must be a bug in that KPackageKit version (0.5.4) and it does not work, and therefore, you cannot update to Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat from 10.04 Lucid Lynx behind a proxy.

The solution was to install the update-manager package and use this program to launch the upgrade task (it handles the http_proxy environment variable correctly).