Having emerged, mostly, from the depths of Windows Vista testing, I've turned my attention to Edgy Eft, the latest version of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.

As its name is meant to imply, this most recent Ubuntu release is supposed to ride the bleeding edge. So far, however, I've found it fairly tame.

Edgy Eft ships with the latest GNOME version, complete with a vertical preview pane-enabled Evolution mail client (see screen). But, overall, I'm finding Edgy Eft less edgy than the Red Hat Fedora Core 6 release I recently reviewed. (See "Fedora Core 6: Innovations continue" at eweek.com.)

One big exception is Edgy Eft's new replacement for the init daemon that drives most Linux distributions. Edgy Eft's alternative, called upstart, should provide faster boot times and future management gains—the likes of which Mac OS X and Solaris users now enjoy from their respective operating systems' overhauled service startup frameworks.

Look for my review of Edgy Eft in a forthcoming issue and at eweek.com.