Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Released

Being such a popular Linux distribution, almost all of Ubuntu’s bi-annual releases experience a good deal of hype right up to their launch, but 11.04, or ‘Natty Narwhal’, took things to the next level. Ever since Canonical announced that its ‘Unity’ desktop environment would ship as the default in 11.04, speculation ran rampant. Even during the beta 2 period there was speculation that Canonical wouldn’t go through with it, but it has.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in our news already, I’ve been using 11.04 full-time on my PC since beta 2 launched, and as you might imagine, I have a lot to comment on. As with any launch of a serious software product, I didn’t want to rush a review out the door just to make the launch. Rather, I am going to re-install the OS with the final build in order to double-check certain things, and see if bugs I discovered were fixed. Our review will be published tomorrow, so don’t miss it!

The biggest change to 11.04 is of course the introduction of the Unity enviroment to the desktop version of the OS. Previously, Canonical had Unity act as the default enviroment for its “Netbook Edition”, but with this launch, that edition is no more. In essence, both the desktop and netbook editions have been merged, since both now utilize the exact same default desktop.

With Unity receiving so much attention, it’s easy to look over some of the other new features, or upgrades, that the OS is getting. For starters, Natty is using the latest Linux kernel, 2.6.38, an up-to-date GCC (4.5), Xorg 1.10.0, Mesa 7.10.1 and include other up-to-date system packages, along with Firefox 4.0, Shotwell 0.9.1 and Evolution 2.32.2. Another rather notable change is the replacement of OpenOffice.org, with LibreOffice (3.3.2).

There have of course been other changes as well, but I’ll talk more about them in the review. If you’re raring to go and want to dive in yourself, you can look through the beta page for Natty which lists almost everything notable, and the “explore” page for a basic overview of the OS as a whole. If you’re a current Ubuntu user and not on an LTS install, you’ll be able to simply run your updater to be prompted to upgrade to the latest version. If you’re not an Ubuntu user but want to give the latest version a go, hit up the website below and download away.