A n October 10, 2010, Canonical released the latest avatar of Ubuntu, 10.10, codenamed 'Maverick Meerkat'. The desktop version of its last release, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, will be supported for three years and the server version for five. The 10.10 release is more about improving core applications, and there are lots of visible improvements. A more polished and efficient Ubiquity installer With the best installer ever, installation has become much easier and more efficient than previous releases.

The greatest fear of every user migrating to a *NIX platform is the struggle for third-party drivers, dependency hell and proprietary audio cadecs, but the Ubuntu installer took care of everything from the beginning (see Figure 2). Once you select a destination partition, the installer begins copying files in the background (see Figure 3) while you fill in the time zone, user information, and other details. Pity no one thought this way earlier-it's done in almost no time.

In my case, it took almost 12 minutes on my three year-old Dell Optiplex 330 (Pentium dual-core 1.6 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 160 GB HDD). Booting into the live environment took a mere 59 seconds-really amazing. A face lift to the Software Centre The Software Centre has improved a lot, and is now pretty close to a dream. It easily handles installation of downloaded packages and software from Ubuntu repositories, and also supports adding third party repositories like Google Chrome, Dropbox, etc. The interface got a great face lift, and now offers smarter categorisation and search features. Another noticeable improvement is that it now offers paid software too. Currently, it offers Fluendo DVD Player for purchase, with more to came. Streaming Ubuntu One music to your smartphone Ubuntu's been inching ever closer to this goal with every release.