ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot (come on people…you could have come up with better that that…) alpha 3 has been released so i thought i’d give it a whirl. been using fedora 15 64 bit since its alpha stage and kind of miss a debian based distro. so i fired up vir­tu­al­box to give it a try. here’s a brief look with some screen­shots (click any of them for a larger view).

the install was smooth and rather speedy (it’s still using some of the 11.04 artwork but that’s normal with ubuntu alpha ver­sions) and within 20 minutes i got to the login screen.

ubuntu have decided to stick with unity instead of moving to gnome 3 as fedora have which i can kind of under­stand as they’ve ploughed so many resources and so much time into it. after logging in we get to the main desktop inter­face and can load up some ‘goodies’.

i’m not dis­lik­ing unity as much as i did the last time i used it…the left bar is actu­ally more con­fig­ur­able than gnome 3’s version. apps can be easily removed (here i got rid of all the usual office guff that’s installed by default) and others added from the main applic­a­tion menu which looks like this…

if you’re too lazy to fire up a ter­minal window the soft­ware centre makes it easy to find and install new soft­ware (i.e. first stop… gimp, build-essential, joe, ubuntu-restricted-extras, filez­illa and ufraw)

11.10 is using a brand-spanking-new kernel (3.0.0-7-generic). hot off the presses. read more about this big step for linux here and here’s the proof…

memory usage isn’t exactly min­im­al­ist but i had a few things running and the virtual machine was only alloc­ated 1GB of RAM. here’s top and htop dis­play­ing the current load and processes

i’m actu­ally quite impressed with 11.10 so far. it’s rather pol­ished and reacts snap­pily (even when running vir­tu­ally) and while i wouldn’t recom­mend you install it on a mission crit­ical machine right now i’m just about to do just that.

EDIT - install com­pleted on my HP Note­book. ran into one problem after logging in… ‘/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exits with status 256′ this also happened when i installed the 10.10 beta as i doc­u­mented here. follow the instruc­tions in that post to correct the error. here’s a wee grab of the fin­ished article running on my machine…