Ubuntu X.org and Prefetch

Ubuntu has some major changes under the hood that are worth taking a look at. UbuntuĀ  includes X.org 7.3 which most notable increases support of multi-monitor setups and graphic card detection. With many problems in the past, the focus has been placed on automatic detection of hardware followed by creation of the appropriate xorg.conf file. My opinion is that this is just another step in the right direction and will encourage beginners if their hardware is detected automatically when running Ubuntu and other Linux distros for the first time.

Developed by Google during the Summer of Code project, Prefetch will speed up boot-time and common application launching by profiling which files are read in which order and will automatically optimize the order of the data on the hard disk. Prefetch comes as a kernel patch and a userspace daemon called "prefetch-process-trace" which acquires the kernel data and dynamically updates profiles.