A brand new set of desktop wallpapers just landed in the Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”.
So far, the Ubuntu 9.04 alpha releases have simply re-used the same wallpaper design you’ll have seen in Ubuntu 8.10.
That’s now changed.
Per the changelog in an update to the the Ubuntu wallpapers package that landed earlier, what you see below are the “new wallpapers for the Jaunty release”:
Take a good look and see if you can spot the jackalope animal motif in the new designs.
Can’t see them?
Nor can anyone — the wallpapers don’t feature the codename mascot animal at all.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” featured a colourful heron on in its desktop background, and Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” bore an ibex (or a mug stain, depending on your Rorschach interpretation of it)
But Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” didn’t use a gibbon on it’s wallpaper, and mascots weren’t part of the design in most of the Ubuntu wallpapers of the past. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule that Ubuntu must feature the mascot animal.
I can’t lie and say it wasn’t nice that it had started to include them.
Either way, the defaults are a pleasant set. Bokeh, arcs of light, and lots of the warm orange-y and brown hues we associate with Ubuntu’s identity.
If you don’t run the Ubuntu 9.04 alpha and you want to use the new wallpapers, you can download the sources from a bug report on Launchpad.