Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released

Official Announcement

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/alpha4

I’m really looking forward to the release of Hardy in April. A lot of things are starting to take shape in Alpha 4. It includes the 2.6.24 kernel. One of the new features is PulseAudio which I’m really looking forward to. The current state of sound on Linux is a mess. PulseAudio will greatly enhance the Linux sound system.

Policykit

With Alpha 4, PolicyKit integration is visible in the administrative user interfaces. PolicyKit makes it possible to run administrative applications as a normal user, and have them get a particular set of extra privileges for certain operations, which allows fine-grained control over user permissions and enhances usability, as well as eliminating the security implications of running the whole application as root.

Transmission

gnome-bt-download has now been replaced with Transmission.

Brasero

The Nautilus CD burner and Serpentine have both been replaced by Brasero.

World Clock Applet

The world clock applet has been added

GVFS

I’m really excited about this.

Nautilus 2.21.6 in Alpha 4 uses GVFS, the virtual filesystem abstraction layer that’s set to replace the aging GnomeVFS in GNOME 2.22, as its backend. In the near future, GVFS will make it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

Yes, at some point in the near future, Nautilus will finally be able to restore items from the trash! Not to mention Nautilus will have an increase in performance.

This is only a few of the new features in 8.04. The complete list is on the official announcement.

8.04 is really coming together nicely and I can’t wait for the release in April