Despite the graphic below showing that Precise Pangolin was “almost here”, my Update Manager window popped up this afternoon to politely advise me that the new release of Ubuntu was, indeed, available and would I like to upgrade to the newest version? Being a sucker for a courteous dialog box, I clicked Upgrade, received proclamations of doom from +John Lewis, and waited…
…and waited, and waited, and waited a bit more. The installer told me that it was “Preparing libc6″, but it seemed to be doing an awful lot of preparing. I’ve prepared entire meals in less time than it was taking to prepare libc6. So eventually, I clicked on the Terminal dropdown to see what was going on.
The installer was actually waiting for input from me in the terminal window. It had an ncurses window open, and was asking about stopping and restarting certain services. I clicked OK, and OK again on the window that followed. After that the installation was quick and painless. So just a tip if you’re doing an upgrade through Update Manager – click on the Terminal dropdown first and save yourselves a long wait!
That little niggle aside, I’m really liking this new release. Most – if not all – of Unity’s rough edges seem to have been smoothed out. Being a “terminal fiend” as I was recently called (thank you +Sean Campbell, I like that 
), I love the new Super key feature (the Windows key on most PCs) – hold it down and an overlay pops up showing keyboard shortcuts.
The HUD is a really interesting addition too. I know this has had a mixed response from some testers, but it works like this: if you press and hold the Alt key in an application, then that application’s menus appear at the top of the screen as expected. If you press and quickly release the Alt key, however, then the HUD is activated. This neat little text box allows you to start typing the command you want to carry out from the menus. For example, stab the Alt key and type p – the HUD will show you the menu commands that match your input (likely File > Print in this example). Just press Enter to select the option – often it’s the default.
The HUD uses fuzzy searching and remembers past searches to try and learn from your input. It’s a really quick way of navigating around applications, and you don’t even have to remove your hands from the keyboard – or navigate a series of nested menus to find what you want. Personally, I love it.
I’m also really liking the new Video lens for the Dash. It searches your local videos, and online sources, which I think is a great way of integrating video searching to the desktop.
Additionally, I’m happy to say that my Wine applications seem to be behaving better than they did on 11.10. The tooltips in Windows applications would often leave an ugly grey box when they deactivated. It was almost as if the drop shadow remained after the tooltip vanished. Anyway, that has now been fixed, so my Wine applications are a lot more visually pleasing.
Did I mention that my Samsung RF511 now starts up in record time? I thought Oneiric was quick, but Precise is like lightning. And there you have it, folks, conclusive proof than a Pangolin is faster than an Ocelot.
I was quite excited about this Ubuntu release. This was the first time I’d been involved with the release as part of the server documentation team, so it’s great to see everything come together. Congratulations to all the developers and teams that put in so much time and effort to make 12.04 LTS such a polished release.