Dear Ubuntu fans, we are proud to announce that, as of this morning, Canonical added a brand-new X-based boot splash, which will be present in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release on October 29th. xplash is the package in charge of the new boot splash and it is a userspace software that uses the X interface to draw a splash screen at boot before the desktop loads. See the video below to see it in action! Softpedia is once again the first website to offer you a preview of the new artwork, which will probably be present in the final release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Well, we've tested it on two 19" Samsung LCDs and a 19" DELL one, and it looks and acts pretty good, without flickering. The idea is to completely replace the existing boot method with a flicker-free one. The graphical boot splash is designed to run on top of the X.Org Server and not Usplash! A graphical operating system switcher will also be present during the boot sequence, accessible by pressing the ESC key (see the second video for a mockup of this feature).

The new X-based boot splash in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) 20090827 Daily Build

Ubuntu 9.10 boot animation test

On October 29th, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) will become the 11th release of the Ubuntu operating system.

Among some of the interesting features that will be present in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), we can mention the lightweight and powerful GNOME 2.28 desktop environment, which brings lots and lots of improvements in many areas, such as Empathy, Evolution, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Media, GNOME Power Manager, and many more. Karmic's kernel packages will be based on the latest version of the unreleased Linux kernel 2.6.31, which will offer improved support for webcam or wireless devices, and new filesystems. Moreover, applications such as OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, The GIMP 2.6, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2, Transmission 1.7 or Pidgin 2.6 (not as default IM client) will also be present in the final version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), due for release in late October this year!

Don't forget to visit our website next Thursday for a detailed report on the Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5 release, where we will unveil more of Karmic's new features!