Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 1 in a virtualbox VM

After the release yesterday of the first Alpha build of what will become Ubuntu 10.04, I downloaded the iso CD image and installed it into a Virtualbox virtual machine.

The first thing to note is that the installation process was extremely slow on a Dell 6400 , with 4 GB of RAM on a base operating system of x86 Ubuntu 9.10. So if you do this, be patient , as it will look like the install has stalled, but it hasn't, it's just thinking about it ;-)

Once installed, the process is identical to the previous version, karmic, and it went without a hitch. It booted fine as the pictures below show.

Looking around breifly shows that it has been bumped to the latest 2.6.32-7 kernel, and the usual suspects have been upgraded, like Gnome and KDE.

There is one new feature on the system tool menu bar which is byubo, which offers system information at the bottom of a terminal screen. The application store has disappeared, but I suspect that it is getting a major overhaul for the next release, so it is just not ready for this version. I fully expect the Ubuntu team to spend a lot of time on developing this , as it could well be a massive revenue earner for them moving forward, along with Ubuntu one their cloud based disk storage offering.

Anyway, you can download it from here --> Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1