Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth's brainchild, has overcome another feat this morning with the advent of Ubuntu v6.04 (Dapper Drake) Flight 4. Dapper Drake Flight 4 is the fourth milestone release in a series of development builds with the release candidate coming out April of 2006. In addition to a host of new extras, the focus of our attention today is on its Xgl and Compiz capabilities. Xgl is the X server architecture layered on top of OpenGL while Compiz is the composting manager to the X.Org project. Both of these projects were largely contributed by Novell. With a few modifications, as well as configuration for the NVIDIA device, we had Xgl and Compiz running on the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 4 LiveCD! The plug-ins utilized were cube, decoration, fade, minimize, move, place, resize, rotate, scale, switcher, wobbly, and zoom. Unfortunately, the Gconf Compiz abilities were not accessible from the Dapper Drake repositories during our testing time. At hand today are a wealth of images demonstrating the various graphical abilities, as well as a few looks at the newly introduced Ubuntu Espresso LiveCD installer. Keep in mind, the Compiz Wobbly shots are quite aliased, thus we are working on an animated preview by the time Xgl + Compiz is
largely introduced to Linux.