Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)
On 23 April 2012 Shuttleworth announced
that Ubuntu 12.10 would be named Quantal Quetzal. As this will be the first of
a series of three releases before the next LTS release, Shuttleworth indicated
that it will include a refreshed look, with work to be done on typography and
iconography. The release is named for the species of Central American birds. Ubuntu
12.10 was released on schedule on 18 October 2012.
Ryan Paul, writing for Ars
Technica, said in April 2012 when the name was announced "A Quetzal is a
colorful bird that is common to Central America. The most well-known variety,
the resplendent quetzal, is known for its beauty. The name is a good fit for Ubuntu,
which aims to soar in the cloud, offer visual appeal without compromising
function, and avoid smacking into closed windows."
The Ubuntu Developer Summit held
in May 2012 set the priorities for this release. They are forecast to include
an improved boot up sequence and log-in screen, dropping Unity 2D in favor of
lower hardware requirements for Unity 3D, wrap around dialogs and toolbars for
the HUD and a "vanilla" version of Gnome-Shell as an option. The
release will likely include GNOME 3.6, Python 3 and the 3.5 Linux kernel. It
will ship with Python 3 in the image, but with Python 2 available in the
repositories, via the "python" package. The kernel will have the PAE
switched on by default.
In July 2012 development versions
of Ubuntu 12.10 received a new combined user, session and system menu. This
release will also include Ubuntu Web Apps, a means of running web applications
directly from the desktop, without having to open a browser. It will also use
Nautilus 3.4 as its file manager, in place of the 3.5 and newer versions to
retain features deleted from later versions.
In September 2012 Canonical’s
Kate Stewart announced that the Ubuntu 12.10 image will not fit on a compact
disc, saying "There is no longer a traditional CD sized image, DVD or
alternate image, but rather a single 800MB Ubuntu image that can be used from
USB or DVD." There is, however, a third-party project that has created a
version of Ubuntu 12.10 that will fit on a CD. It uses LZMA2 compression
instead of the DEFLATE compression used on the official Ubuntu DVD image.
Also in late September 2012 it
was announced that the version of Unity to be shipped with Ubuntu 12.10 would
by default include searches of Amazon.com for searched terms. This move caused
immediate controversy among Ubuntu users, particularly with regard to privacy
issues, and caused Mark Shuttleworth to issue a statement indicating that this
feature is not adware and labelled many of the objections "FUD"
(Fear, uncertainty and doubt). Shuttleworth stated "What we have in 12.10
isn’t the full experience, so those who leap to judgement are at maximum risk
of having to eat their words later. Chill out. If the first cut doesn’t work
for you, remove it, or just search the specific scope you want (there are
hotkeys for all the local scopes)." Regardless users filed a Launchpad bug
report on the feature requesting that it be made a separate lens and not
included with general desktop searches for files, directories and applications.
The degree of community push-back on the issue resulted in plans by the
developers to make the dash and where it searches user configurable via a GUI
setting dialogue. There were concerns that the setting dialogue would not be
completed in time for the final version of Ubuntu 12.10, but it was completed
and is present in the final version of 12.10.
In the week prior to the stable
release of Ubuntu 12.10 data privacy advocate Luís de Sousa indicated that the
inclusion of the shopping lens, installed without explicit permission of the
user, violates European Directive 95/46/EC on data privacy. That directive
requires that the "data subject has unambiguously given his consent"
in situations where personal identifying information is sent.
In reviewing Ubuntu 12.10 at the
end of October 2012 for DistroWatch, Jesse Smith raised concerns about the
Amazon shopping lens, saying, "it has raised a number of privacy concerns
in the community and, looking over Ubuntu's legal notice about privacy does not
provide any reassurance. The notice informs us Canonical reserves the right to
share our keystrokes, search terms and IP address with a number of third
parties, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the BBC. This feature is
enabled by default, but can be turned off through the distribution's settings
panel." He also found that the dash provided very slow performance and
that the release was "practically unusable in the VirtualBox
environment". He summed up his experiences, "After a day and a half
of using Ubuntu 12.10 it was an internal struggle not to wipe my hard drive and
just find another distribution to review. During the first twenty-four hours
Ubuntu spied on me, provided performance which was distinctly sub par, the
interface regularly popped up errors (sometimes so frequently the first pop-up
wouldn't have faded out of view before the next one appeared), the update
notification didn't work and it wasn't possible to turn off accessibility
features through the graphical interface. Adding insult to injury, the Unity
dash kept locking up or losing focus while I was trying to use it and the
operating system crashed more times than not while trying to shutdown or
logout. Switching away from Unity to GNOME Fallback helped the performance issues
I had experienced with the Dash, but it didn't remove the annoying pop-up
errors and performance (while usable) still wasn't as good as I would expect.
And what really makes me scratch my head is Ubuntu 12.04 worked really well on
this same hardware.
In early November the Electronic
Frontier Foundation made a statement on the shopping lens issue,
"Technically, when you search for something in Dash, your computer makes a
secure HTTPS connection to productsearch.ubuntu.com, sending along your search query
and your IP address. If it returns Amazon products to display, your computer
then insecurely loads the product images from Amazon's server over HTTP. This
means that a passive eavesdropper, such as someone sharing a wireless network
with you, will be able to get a good idea of what you're searching for on your
own computer based on Amazon product images. It's a major privacy problem if
you can't find things on your own computer without broadcasting what you're
looking for to the world.
Writing about Ubuntu 12.10 in a
December 2012 review, Jim Lynch addressed the Amazon controversy, "One of
the desktop changes that some folks might not like is the web app link to
Amazon.com. This might come across as a bridge too far in terms of the outright
commercialization of Ubuntu. And it is an eery reminder of all the garbage that
gets installed on Windows PCs by default, by the hardware companies. Is this
where Ubuntu is going? Will you someday boot into your Ubuntu desktop only to
find tons of commercial crapware clogging up your desktop by default? I sure
hope not, as it will be another reason for people to avoid Ubuntu." He
concluded, saying, "Overall, Ubuntu 12.10 is a decent upgrade for current
Ubuntu users. However, the inclusion of the Amazon icon on the launcher, and
the discontinuation of Unity 2D might irritate some people.
DOWNLOAD
UBUNTU 12.10 QUANTAL QUETZAL
32 bit
64 bit
Posted by : Tanah Pangeran
Date :
