Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 ditches HAL
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx alpha 2 comes without monolithic Hal, the Hardware Abstraction Layer that lay between Ubuntu and its hardware – with the aim of making Ubuntu faster to boot and faster to resume from suspend. Hal’s functions have been picked up by Devicekit – a modular
Hal.
Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 also includes the latest GNOME desktop environment, kernel version 2.6.32-10.14, and improved support for nVidia proprietary graphics drivers. As often said, this is an alpha release, do not install it on production machines.