Looking toward 9.04, and bididng adieu to 7.10

Maximum PC has a nice write up on the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope”. As I’ve said before, 9.04 is looking really nice with the info I’ve seen so far, and this article makes the case even better that the next release could be one sweet little collection of code. As soon as I can see a notice that Ubuntu 9.04 has reached beta status I’ll make sure it gets posted for all to try, and I’ll snag it and give it a nice little test so I can give you guys an early look through my peepers. Thanks to Nanci, who spotted the article on Google News and made sure I saw it. (You could have blogged it yourself, sis. I wouldn’t have minded. )

For those of you who are running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, the Ubuntu devs have announced that they will stop providing “security and critical fixes” for it on Saturday, 18 April. This date is eighteen months after Gutsy was released, as is the standard practice for non Long Term Support (LTS) releases. The current LTS version is 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, which will be supported for three years (for desktop systems, five years for servers) with security updates and other packages.

For more info on the end of life announcement for Ubuntu 7.10 you can ready the official notice on the ubuntu-announce maillist archive.

For the record, the version is 9.04, not 9.0; it’s based on the year it’s released (2009) and the month it’s released (April, which equals 04), which is always a two digit number. The version number does not shorten to zaro (“0″), just as the October releases nevershorten to simply “.1″. It may seem like a nitpicky thing to fuss about, but it’s the difference between being accurate and, well, not.

Get a head start on the next version of Ubuntu

Back in September I posted about a way to use the kernel from the then in development Gutsy Gibbon version of Ubuntu. You can now get the kernel for the Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” thanks to instructions on the Ubuntu Forums.

Ubuntu Community releases 7.10 Desktop Course

The members of the Ubuntu community have put together a great Desktop Course that covers Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” that can be a great way to learn how to do thing s in the latest version of Ubuntu.

[UPDATED] What a long, strange trip it’s been

[Updated to include setting up the PDF Printer as the default and to add one more launcher to my dock. And I added a screenie of the updated dock. - Nanci]
[Updated 29 December to finally add that missing for the networks startup and AWN, as well as more info on getting Acrobat Reader 7. - Nanci]

No, I haven’t been listening to a little Dead, although I just fired it up on my computer. Over the weekend I decided I was finally ready to get Windows XP off my computer and go 100% Ubuntu Linux. But it was no where as way as it should have been, and there were several calls to my brother Peng to try to get things working right. But I’m going to do you a favor and let you guys know not only what happened, but also how to deal with what came up so that if you run into problems installing Ubuntu Gutsy you’ll have a better idea of what to do to fix it than I had.

Need Ubuntu tutorials? We’ve got some

I’ve been asked to pass along an excellent resource for Ubuntu users old and new alike. I’ve used it myself, and I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to some of them, but I want to make sure you guys know it’s out there.

Thursday’s the day

Of course if you’ve been reading my blog (and a lot of you have been. THANKS! ) you know that Ubuntu Gutsy will be released tomorrow. There’s a few things you need to know about it, and if you haven’t seen them yet I’m going to tell you now.

Ubuntu Gutsy is now a Release Candidate

You read that right. With seven days left before the release date you can now get Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, is a Release Candidate (RC). What does that mean? It means it’s almost ready to be released, but they want to run a final round of testing before they open up the cage on the ape out of its cage.

Congrats to the Massachusetts Ubuntu LoCo Team!

My brother asked me to pass along worth that the Massachusetts Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) team got approved as an official Ubuntu LoCo team. Congrats, y’all!

Another Gutsy major update before the release, but this one was painless

You may remember that I did a major Ubuntu upgrade back on the 5th, and I ended up with some pretty bad video issues. I saw that there were some updates earlier this evening, including another rather minor kernel upgrade, from 2.6.22-13 to 2.6.22-14 and the obligatory video driver upgrades. The change notes weren’t available yet so I waited until I could see what was being changed.

I finally checked again and saw all the change notes for the over 60 programs that wanted to be upgraded so I hit the nice, friendly Install Updates button. (Not to be confused with a big red button that should never ever be pushed. Bonus points if you caught the reference I just used. The first person to post the right answer in a comment will get a free Nanci’s Naughties tee if you’re on SecondLife.) When it was all done I crossed my fingers and rebooted my computer without running Envy to update the video drivers like I used to do all the time.

You can now request your Ubuntu Gutsy LiveCDs

We’re now ten days away from the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, and while you can burn LiveCDs of the beta version now, many of us would like to order official discs. As of today you can now submit your request for free CDs of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).