The release of the newest version of Ubuntu is only 10 days away. Many sites, including MakeTechEasier have covered its pending arrival and given you a glimpse of the Beta version. Today we are going to take a look at Kubuntu, the KDE-based version of Ubuntu.

Yes, after six months down the road, it’s time to gear up for the newly born Ubuntu baby again. This time, Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, will be officially released on 29th Oct 2009.  We, at MakeTechEasier have not been slacking around. With the release of the 9.10 beta, we have grabbed the LiveCD image, wipe our machines clean and installed the full version onto it. Now, let us present you the screenshots tour (and new features) review of Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 beta.

For those who own an iPhone/iPod Touch and at the same time is an Ubuntu (or Linux) users, here’s is a good news. You can now easily mount your iPhone in your Ubuntu without having to jailbreak your phone.

In the past, the dirty but effective way to access the iPhone from your Linux system is via SSH. This requires you to jailbreak your phone and it voids the warranty. With iFuse, you can now mount your iPhone/iPod Touch under Linux with just a USB cable. You can also view/edit/cut/copy/paste the file just like any USB disk drive.

As time goes on, netbooks are getting more and more popular. These small, cheap, portable computers are gaining popularity in situations where you want the flexibility of a laptop, but don’t need the raw power or price tag of a high-end machine. Some come with Windows, some come with Linux. Unfortunately, the pre-installed Linux on some netbooks can be lacking in quality and features. For those who aren’t satisfied with the default OS on their netbook, Ubuntu has created Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

As the name implies, it’s Ubuntu with some tweaks to make the size and speed of the OS more appropriate to the hardware you’ll find in your average netbook. The most noticable difference is that they’ve completely re-skinned the standard Gnome desktop into something more closely resembling Gnome Shell than the Gnome you’re used to.

The Chromium team has released an alpha unstable version of the Google Chrome for Linux and Mac platform. Those who are keen to try out Google Chrome in their Ubuntu machine, but are not willing to run it under wine, you can now grab the deb file and install it in your system.

One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on Wubi here and there but have never really gone into detail on exactly what it can do and how it works. According to the website,

Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way…

That sums it up pretty well. You can use your Windows (98, 2000, XP, Vista) Control Panel to add/remove it as easily as any other Windows app.

The key thing about Wubi (Windows based Ubuntu Installer) is that you do not have to do any partitioning. It simply creates a file in Windows that both systems treat as if it’s a separate partition. You can choose the size of that file when you install.

Don’t you hate it when you’re in the middle of something important and the operating system keeps bugging you to reboot your computer, just because an important security update was installed ?

I hate it and I’m sure the guys behind Ksplice hated it too. They hated it so much that they decided to do something about it and developed Uptrack.

Uptrack is a software updater which works in much the same way as Ubuntu’s default update manager, with the exception of one important step. Uptrack doesn’t require the computer to be rebooted after an update has been installed. Ksplice, the company behind Uptrack, has developed a technology which lets a running program, even the kernel, be upgraded without the need for a reboot.

For those who are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you will notice that there is a change in the way the system notifies you to upgrade software. In the past, an icon will appear on the system tray whenever there is new update available. In Ubuntu Jaunty, instead of showing the icon, the update manager will now pop up the window as and when it detects new update. While this is a good way to grab the user attention and get them to upgrade to the latest software version promptly, it can be pretty annoying for many, especially when you are in the midst of your work. To make it worst, if you close it without updating, it will keep on popping up in regular interval until you have upgraded your system.

Luckily, you can turn off this pop up feature easily and switch back to the old icon-appear-at-system-tray mode.

We have covered the easy way to mount iso images in Windows. This time round, we are going to cover the easy way to mount an iso, bin or cue file in Ubuntu without having to hit the terminal every time.

With the use of fuesiso and nautilus-actions, we can easily create an option in Nautilus to mount the CD images right from the context menu (mouse right click).

Here it goes:

In most Linux distro (including Ubuntu), the keyboard combo Ctrl + Alt + Backspace is often used as a shortcut key to restart X. However, in Ubuntu Jaunty, this keyboard shortcut was disabled, “to reduce issues experienced by users who accidentally trigger the key combo”, as quoted by Ubuntu.

I don’t know how many people will find this a welcome improvement in Ubuntu. Personally, this has caused me a lot of inconvenience as I always depend on it to get myself out of a nasty crash.

For those who wanted to restore back the Ctrl + Alt + Backspace combo, here’s the way: