Canonical is set to release Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) this month, and the first Beta is now available as an installable image.
I've been running various flavors of Linux for many years as my primary operating system, and am impressed with the ease of use and stability of Ubuntu. I particularly appreciate the lack of viruses, trojans and other malware for the OS, and have switched over a couple of the machines that the wife and kids use without any complaints.
If you're curious to try out the newest version of the popular Linux-based operating system, you might want to try installing and running it in a virtual environment such as VirtualBox.
In case you haven't encountered it previously, VirtualBox is an open-source x86 emulator. Using VirtualBox, you can create a virtual environment on your current system and run a complete, self-contained operating system within. Your host system can be Linux, Windows, OS X or Solaris, and the guest system can be any number of operating systems such as Windows, DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, OpenBSD, etc. The advantage of running a guest operating system is that it is entirely sand-boxed off from the host OS, so your primary working environment is perfectly safe.
Using VirtualBox, you can easily create an environment, install Ubuntu 11.04 and spend some time getting to love/hate the new Unity interface and other changes since Ubuntu 10.10. In order to get things to work, you are going to have to do a couple of things though:
- Install the latest version of VirtualBox
- Create a VirtualBox virtual machine and enable "3D Acceleration" on the Display Settings tab
- Grab an up-to-date .iso of Natty Narwhal and install it
- Once you have installed 11.04, open up a terminal inside the virtual Ubuntu and update the system via the usual "
sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade", or just use the GUI Update Manager; you may need to restart the virtual machine afterward - Once you have upgraded the virtual Ubuntu (and probably restarted it), open up a terminal inside and execute the following command:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-utils
Ubuntu's new Unity interface is heavily reliant on 3D rendering, so the points about enabling 3D acceleration for the virtual machine and installing the VirtualBox guest utilities are critical. Those things need only be done once and are quite easy, so this is a pretty painless way to get going.
Once you have things set up, you can play with the 11.04 Beta and its controversial new Unity interface. I've previously used Unity on a netbook, and find that it took some getting used to, but I eventually grew to appreciate it. If you absolutely despise Unity, it's still possible to revert to a more classic Gnome interface -- just select “Ubuntu Classic" from the options menu before you log-in to the OS next time.
A full description of the changes in 11.04 is available here.
Note that you may encounter some glitches with the 11.04 Beta, since it is a beta version after all. At the moment, it seems slow to start up on VirtualBox, and there is an error about Compiz dying when you first boot up. Aside from those startup glitches, everything seems to work pretty well though.
