The Canonical Design team is currently running a contest for beautiful desktop wallpapers for its upcoming Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 scheduled to be released in October 2009. They have created a photo pool on Flickr where you can submit or just browse proposed backgrounds.

In Karmic Koala (9.10), though, Ubuntu seems to be shifting more towards the Windows 7 style... The plan is apparently to offer, in addition to the default wallpaper, a selection of more diverse alternative wallpapers, including photographs, which is a first for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Beta was released today and includes the previously mentioned:

-Updated Human GDM theme, Humanity icons and new log-out screen
-New wallpapers and GDM theme - The gdm 2.28 login manager is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases, permitting a more integrated login experience.

The final release of Karmic Koala comes out in a week. Of all the variants of Karmic Koala coming out, Ubuntu is undoubtably the most well know with the largest userbase. In this article, we look at all the official variants of Karmic Koala (including Ubuntu) so that it may help the newbies to see what are the options available.

I've upgraded ever since Gutsy: to Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. But this time, I did a fresh install of Karmic Koala, given the new Grub, ext4 and so on. Here are some things (bugs I mean - with potential fixes) I've experienced running Ubuntu Karmic Koala as my main OS (for about 2 days now):

Some time ago we talked about using more than 3 GB of RAM in Ubuntu 32bit which involved installing the server kernel. Well, this is no longer possible in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10). But because many OEMs and users requested a 32 bit PAE enabled kernel, Karmic Koala now comes with linux-generic-pae meta package which enables PAE in Ubuntu 32 bit, thus allowing you to use more than 3GB of RAM.

There have been proposed quite a few themes for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 and if you want to install them all in Ubuntu Jaunty for instance, you can just do:

sudo apt-get install community-themes

Today is Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala artwork deadline which means all the artwork will remain unchanged from now on, until Karmic is released. There have been a lot of updates today, so let's take a look at how Ubuntu Kamic Koala will look like.

I'll begin with the end :) meaning the log-out screen which I saw as soon as I updated and wanted to restart Karmic Alpha 6:

Ubuntu 9.10 is the upcoming version of the Ubuntu operating system. The common name given to this release from the time of its early development was “Karmic Koala”.