Ubuntu gets jaunty with newest release

The next release of the Ubuntu operating system has been officially dubbed 'Jaunty Jackalope', according to Mark Shuttleworth who laid out the details of Ubuntu 9.04.

The name follows Canonical's conventions of naming each release after an animal, and Shuttleworth's statement suggests that with the release of Jaunty the company is ready to mount a serious challenge to Microsoft and Apple.

"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," said Shuttleworth, chief executive of Canonical, the company that sponsors development of Ubuntu.

"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."

While the announcement concentrates of general goals, rather than specific features, Shuttleworth suggests that Jaunty Jackalope will bring with it a serious boost in boot times and general performance. Speeding up boot times has also been identified by Microsoft as a key consideration when developing Windows 7.

"There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty," noted Shuttleworth. "One of them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible-both in the standard case, and especially when it is being tailored to a specific device... Let's see if we can make booting or resuming Ubuntu blindingly quick."

"Another goal is the blurring of web services and desktop applications," he added, though he did not elaborate on how this would be accomplished.

Shuttleworth claimed the details of Jaunty will be hammered out at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, to be held in Google's Mountain View campus from 8-12 December this year.

The news comes as Ubuntu gears up to release version 8.10 of the operating system, Intrepid Ibex, in October 2008.