[Corrected the version names. -Peng]

As I mentioned in the previous post, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has reached it’s sixth, and probably last, alpha version. Not only does that mean that it should hit beta very soon (it’s scheduled for 1 October) it also means that it should have hit the feature freeze by now. And that means that the next version of Ubuntu should get its name soon.

We usually post an item when the new codename, but this time we have something even better. Over the weekend Mark Shuttleworth made the announcement as he was speaking via video to UbuCon at the Atlanta Linux Fest. Since the vid is on YouTube I’ll post it here rather than sending you off to another site to see it.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Yes, Ubuntu 10.04, an LTS (long term support) release, will be called the Lucid Lynx. It’s nice to see the Ubuntu community will be sharing the feline love next April.

Suggestions are already coming for the 10.10 version of Ubuntu, although they may break the normal naming scheme and coordinate the name with the Debian release. I guess only time will tell on that one.

I had been seeing on the Ubuntu Developer’s list that they were getting ready to do a feature freeze on Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”, and yesterday the put the freeze on,  meaning that they had pretty much decided what’s going into the next version of Ubuntu.

Once a new version of Ubuntu reaches feature freeze it’s time to name the version after that, and I just got an email from Mark Shuttleworth announcing that Ubuntu 9.10 will be codenamed the Karmic Koala.

A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds. Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools.

I was going to sat that I haven’t seen any announcement pics like I had seen from Stefano Forenza for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jakelope”, but when I hit Stefano’s blog I found a picture of a very cuddly little mascot for Ubuntu 9.10.

Ubuntu 9.10 won’t be a Long Term Support release like Ubuntu 8.04 is, you can read Mark’s announcement for more details, although he’s already put out a teaser:

The desktop will have a designer’s fingerprints all over it – we’re now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options. Come to UDS for a preview of the whole new look. whole new look.

I can’t wait to see the new look, especially since I’ve never been that big a fan of the whole brown thing they’ve had going on. Of course before we can get to the marsupial we have the jackelope due out in April. You can check out the blueprints up for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” and when it reaches beta status I’ll let y’all know so you can help get us ready to release it.

I hope there’s enough coffee nearby for those who were up late watching the election returns last night. I know the butt-crack of dawn came pretty early after being awake until the west coast pools closed.

I have some links I meant to share yesterday but ended up having more errands to run (including voting) than I had time at my comp so I had to hold them for today. I’ve recently added some GNOME-specific feeds to my RSS reader, as well as Planet Debian, so I’ll be sharing some links from those sources as well in the days to come.

• Henri Bergius: Midgard: benefits of synchronized releases. Mark Shuttleworth called for synchronizing release dates among open source projects earlier this year, and the Midgard Project has joined the crowd.
• uraeus: BBC Totem Plugin. A very nice post on the new Totem plugin for enjoying media feeds from the Beeb, as well as good news for other broadcasters.
• Lydia Pintscher: Ataksak. Amarok 2.0 beta 3 is now available, and it may be the last beta release. Which is good news for many since Amarok is among the very best media players available to friends of the penguin, even those who don’t run KDE-based desktops. That’s how good it is. I was using Project Neon, the nightly testing builds of Amarok 2, until I upgraded to Intrepid. I’ll have to see about finding a nice package for Intrepid so I can check out the new beta.
• Daniel Borgmann: Thoughts on the GUI. Daniel looks at the current crop of GNOME themes and brings up some very nice ideas.
• Jonathan Ernst: Avoiding feature regressions should be more important than (exact) time based releases. Jonathan looks some the old issues that came back in Ubuntu Intrepid (including “CD drives ear your fingers”, which is a great way to put an annoying little bugger that I’ve fought with) and questions why some of the regressions didn’t block Intrepid’s release. And there were some great follow-up posts from Mackenzie Morgan and Henrik Omma, not to mention a great note to the new president-elect from Stephan Hermann. And you can really tell Brandon Holtsclaw is a political/Linux geek. Hee!
• Mark Shuttleworth: This is not the end of capitalism. Our favorite spaceman has a follow-up on a post he wrote about the “economic unwinding of 2008″. Coming from a man who’s made many millions himself should give it a bit more weight to his rather well-informed position.

At the risk of ticking some of our readers off, I have two other election-related posts that I think are so nice that I can’t keep them to myself. Philip Van Hoof wrote an article that I think should be required for every person in America (and beyond) on this day after the election, and Stuart Langridge has found an even better map of how the country voted for the next president than your basic red/blue maps.

And for everyone who’s griping about how the election went (other than the legalized discrimination passed in California yesterday) let me ask you a question. How’s your 401(k) doing today?

Hope your Hump Day isn’t too much of a pain in your arse.

I’m going to have to make this one a little quick with it being Friday afternoon and a certain game is already in progress. I would have held off until tomorrow but I’ve already got a task added that will have me running around more than I realized I would be.

• LinuxDevices.com: Mobile Firefox ready for download. It’s still a testing build, with the final due in “a few weeks.” There are some nice features for mobile users that I was wondering about.
• Stefano Forenza: Idiotic Apple. Another cross post from the Ubuntu Weblogs, but Apple has received a patent for their dock. AWN users probably wonder what this means for our favorite dock, but the AWN team has also posted a link to the response from the AWN devs.
• Mark Shuttleworth: It’s a solvency problem, not a liquidity problem. The founder of Ubuntu looks at the current economic crisis, which is welcome seeing how he has enough money to form a global company whose primary purpose [may be | is] to promote the use of free and open source software. I especially like his thoughts on executive compensation, which I think should be posted (or linked to) everywhere.
• Dave Murphy: 24 Hours with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I haven’t had a chance to check Ubuntu Intrepid’s 1st beta yet, but Dave tells the pluses and minuses he found in his first day of working with it.
• Heinrick Geman: BrowserSpy moved. Heinrik’s tool for seeing how much info your browser is revealing about you and your computer got it’s own website. I was surprised at how much info my browser was revealing, even under Linux. I did notice that the bandwidth tests crashed Firefox 3.0.3/Linux every time I tried it, but that may be a Flash issue rather than a Mozilla issue.

I’m still holding on to that program update news until I can verify that the bug I found is squashed. I’ll try to post something this weekend, but if not I’ll see you guys Monday. Have a great weekend, y’all.

GO DODGERS!

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux distro has been names the IT Community Hero of the Year by CNET Networks UK. He received the honor for “the support he has given to the community of developers working on the Ubuntu project and his commitment to a freely available operating system that can be used by anybody, anywhere in the world.”

It’s no secret that he wants Linux in general to be even more successful than it already is, and while he fights for Ubuntu to be easier to use and prettier the improvements he pushes for are in many cases things that won’t be applicable just to Ubuntu.

You can get more info in the press release on SourceWire.com. Thanks to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for bringing this story to my attention.

Canonical, sponsor of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, has announced the code name for the version due out in April. The name for each version follows a patter of an alliterative adjective followed by an animal name, and that has given us releases called Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon and the current Hardy Heron, with Intrepid Ibex due out in October. (In fact Beta 5 of Ubuntu Intrepid just came out last week, and one tester is “very much impressed” with it.)

With Intrepid having reached the feature freeze point Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth sent an announcement to the Ubuntu Development Announcement list, but I have to share with you a pair of images that Stefano Forenza created to celebrate the announcement.

As Mark says,

The Warrior Rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of the traditional big OSV’s – Microsoft and Apple. The bar is set very high, and we have been given the opportunity to leap over it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine, and we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as a whole by what we do.

That’s right, the codename for the next version of Ubuntu will be….

Mark goes on in the announcement to say

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications. “Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication – a desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!” This hare has legs – and horns – and we’ll be exploring it in much more detail for Jaunty. We have already laid some foundations for weblications in the online services discussions that took place in Prague, but since we fully expect those services to ship in 9.04 the discussion will be that much more intense in Mountain View.

Those bizarre-but-fearsome antlers might well remind one of the intricate pattern of collaboration between developers in a distributed version control system. So it’s fitting that Jaunty will see us move all of Ubuntu into Bazaar. For the first time, any developer will be able to branch any Ubuntu package with a single bzr command, publish their changes, and perhaps even publish builds of that package in their own Package Archive. We will also make the developer community structure of Ubuntu much richer – in addition to MOTU and core-dev, we are introducing ways for developers to participate in specific applications, either at the package-upload level or at the version-control level. Whatever your level and specialisation of interest, we’ll make sure that you can participate accordingly.

You can view responses from the Ubuntu community on Planet Ubuntu posts from Martin Albisetti, Jonathan Jesse, Stephan Hermann (who has a great picture of a Wolpertinger from Wikipedia) and Luis de Bethencourt.

Special thanks to Stefano Forenza for sharing his great Cheezburger pics with us.

Can you believe it’s almost August? Dang the seasons (other than maybe winter) are flying by more and more. I’m sure it’s not technology’s fault.

• Alan Pope: Demented by Design. While I support the anti-DRM work of Defective by Design, their latest effort will probably mean more people within the Mac community, especially people who work and use the Genius Bar, will like the open source community even more. +1, Alan.
• Scott Ritchie: Wine should “embrace and extend” the Microsoft Installer format. Scott has a great idea, but I wonder how well it would work in real world code. If it can work it would be a great way to help more people move to open source operating systems.
• Juan Carlos Torres: KDE 4.1: Good enough for ME. Juan Carlos give a great preview of some of the goodies coming in the new “dot release” for KDE, due tomorrow. It looks nice enough it almost makes me want to install KDE 4 on my Ubuntu box so I can take it for a test drive. Too bad I’m not sure how all of my goodies like AWN and Do, let alone Mac4Lin, would play with it.
• Mark Shuttleworth: Economic clustering and Free Software release coordination. Back in April our favorite spaceman suggested that open source devs should release most of their new versions the same day to boost the press that open source projects get. He was speaking at the Linux Symposium on Friday and great feedback on his idea. The comparison to car manufacturers that he relates really helps illustrate what he’s trying to say.

Before I close I have to pass along a picture I saw yesterday.

I can only think of two words that express how I feel about this picture. Hell. Yeah. I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, first published 4 June 2006, has published their milestone 100th issue. In addition to the regular news roundup there are podcasts from not only UWN staff past and present, but also from an interview with Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu wiki page) the man who started the Ubuntu Project as a Linux distribution.

If you never read an issue of UWN and never plan to read another one you should read the 100th issue.

I hope everyone had a nice weekend and didn’t find yourselves sweating like mad as I am. Yes, even Malden (just outside of Boston) is working on a heat wave, and as of this writing we’re a mere four degrees from officially being in one. Four degrees? At ten am? No problem. We’ll definitely cross 90. Luckily I only have a few of links for you coming out of the weekend. Or is that unfortunately, since once you’re done visiting the links you lose the excuse for sitting in the air conditioning. Sorry, my bad.

/me reaches for his iced coffee and makes sure there’s a pitcher of iced tea or lemonade in the fridge.

• Cody A.W. Somerville/Planet Ubuntu: New Tablet PC. Cody has himself a laptop that’s actually a tablet/convertible comp. And he got Xubuntu working so well he wrote the blog post on the tablet. Sweet!
• Mark Shuttleworth/Planet Ubuntu: Netbooks preloaded with Ubuntu. Since Canonical announced the Ubuntu Netbook Remix several computer manufacturers have expressed an interest in selling netbooks with Ubuntu preloaded. Mark looks at the launchers they were considering (he loves AWN) and includes some screenshots of what they came up with.
• NewsEmergency.com: FDA Warns Consumers Nationwide Not to Eat Certain Types of Raw Red Tomatoes. There’s a salmonella outbreak tied to certain types of tomatoes, so once again we have to be careful while shopping for fresh produce.

Adorable Feline Pic of the Day

Again I had a hard time choosing which kitty to share with you. I had a tiny yawning kitteh that was so cute I didn’t mind yawning myself and an absolutely adorable kitteh from Slovenia, but when it was all said and done I had to pick this ferocious little beastie.

Check out the audio clips people submitted for the pic. I especially love the one by soapip.

I came across an idea that’s getting tossed between Mark Shuttleworth and Tristan Rhodes suggesting that Linux distributions, and open source devs in general, synchronize their release schedules.

Part of the logic is the incredible ink that open source could generate if Ubuntu (and it’s siblings), Fedora and OpenSuse all released new versions one day. It would be incredibly cool, and the world would be unable to avoid hearing about the new options to Windows and OSX. As Mark Shuttleworth said,

“We know when the next LTS will be probably with better confidence than we know when Windows 7 will ship. I would take that bet.”

I have to admit I wouldn’t bet against hi on that, but I see two possible problems. First there could be confusion if all the major Linux distros released on the same day, plus we could end up with users tuning out the news instead of rejoicing in it.

The second issue is that this schedule could force open source projects to try to hold to release schedules that may not be best for them. Tristan points out Firefox 3, but Mozilla has always said it would be released “when it’s ready” and not a day sooner. As it is we have a beta web browser being the default in Ubuntu Hardy despite Mozilla’s insistence that Firefox 3 is one of those rare beta builds that should not be used by everyone. Yes, I know, there are several beta programs in Ubuntu Hardy but a web browser isn’t just any old program. It has to simply work right out of the box, and while Firefox 3 is close to that point they’re not there yet.

You can read Tristan’s post for more information on the idea. Let me know what you guys (and gals) think. I know I’m probably a voice crying in the wilderness about beta browsers being in official OS releases (LTS, Long-Term Support, or not), but what do you all think of it?