Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) reached end of life today. That means that if you use Ubuntu 13.10, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support). That's because after July 17, 2014, "Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 13.10".

The wallpaper pack comes with 18 elegant images, including 3 cool salamander wallpapers:

As you probably know, the Nvidia graphics drivers have received initial Optimus support a while back. Currently, the Nvidia GPU can be used to render the desktop, but there's no power saving yet. That means you can for instance play games or watch videos using hardware acceleration.

But to be able to take advantage of this feature in the latest Nvidia drivers, you need up-to-date dependencies (such as Randr 1.4, Xorg 1.13 - that's what the initial Nvidia release notes mention, but it seems you actually need 1.14 -, Linux Kernel 3.9 with some special flags enabled), as well as a custom xorg.conf file and some other bits.

That means that out of the box, the only Ubuntu version that can use this initial Optimus support in the Nvidia graphics drivers is Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, but even in Saucy, you need to configure some things to get it to work.

If you're using Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander or newer, things got a lot easier and you don't need to configure anything to be able to take advantage of this Optimus feature in the Nvidia graphics drivers 319.12+: a package called "nvidia-prime", which comes with a set of tools that enable Nvidia's Prime on MUXless systems, has been uploaded to the Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander repositories about a month ago and it has currently reached version 0.4 (released today).

For now, Unity 8 is in its early alpha stages and not ready for use, and in fact, there's a message on the wallpaper used by it that says just that:

Unity 8 (also known as Unity Next) on the other hand, won't be available by default and instead, Saucy Salamander will use Unity 7, the codebase which is already in the Saucy development.