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.

Even though Ubuntu’s servers were absolutely hammered today, I was able to download and test out the latest 9.10 Karmic Koala beta.

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):

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.

Yesterday I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Beta release by way of the desktop (Live-CD) based installer. The installation was very clean and polished. It has been a while since I’ve used a graphical installer and I am pleased with the improvements that I found.

The Ubuntu project released Karmic Koala alpha 5 (Ubuntu 9.10), which adds Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud support, a new Ubuntu Cloud file-sharing service, and default switches to GCC 4.4, Ext4, and GRUB 2. Meanwhile, Canonical launched a Red Hat-esque Premium Service Engineer support program for large enterprises.

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.

UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) for Karmic Koala took place this year, between the 25th and 29th of May, in Barcelona, Spain. There were 270 blueprints that needed to be discussed during the summit, like the new professional look of Plymouth (an application that takes care of the graphical boot animation) for Karmic Koala, which will not become reality very soon.

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”.