The what?

If you haven’t been following the news lately (not the political type), Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu (Canonical), has officially named Ubuntu 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope“; which is expected to be released on April 2009. But before that we are expecting Intrepid Ibex next month. Even though Ubuntu is my default distro in all my computers; two things I absolutely dislike about Ubuntu, is their naming convention and their default look. At the rate of six months release cycle I am hoping they will soon run out of funny names for Ubuntu.

On the bright side there is a storm brewing at Ubuntu brainstorm for a killer Ubuntu theme with a large number of user vote. Even though it might be too late for this to be the default look for ibex, but with enough support, this might end up being the default theme for Jaunty, so if you like this theme show your support by voting for it. It’s better than the theme the developers were trying out on their earlier Ibex Alpha releases.

Some of the key features that the developers will be working on for Jaunty, as pointed out by Mark Shuttleworth in his announcement:

- Blindingly quick boot time.

- “Weblication”, seamless integration of desktop application with the web. (gOS, anyone?)

- Move Ubuntu into Bazaar distribution revision control system; to make life easier for developers to distribute and share packages and builds.

So sometime in the middle of next year when you are hanging out with your friends and someone brings up some of the cool new features of OS X “Snow Leopard”, feel free to jump in and talk about “Jaunty Jackalope”; but you could always call it “Ubuntu 9.04″, only if your friend calls his Mac, “Mac OS X v10.6″, or if he is a Vista user: “Vista 6.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) (Build 6001) (6001.18063.080425-1930.)”