The team behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has unleashed plans for its October 2009 release, adding a new name with an Australian flavour to the company's alliteration menagerie: Ubuntu 9.10, "Karmic Koala".
The release is aimed squarely at cloud computing, with the intention to incorporate programming interfaces from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to allow for quick deployment of cloud applications. The ability to create an EC2-style cloud will be included courtesy of the Eucalyptus project.
"If that sounds rather open and nebulous, then we've hit the sweet spot for cloud computing futurology," the project's patron and founder, Mark Shuttleworth, wrote in an email to developers.
On the desktop, an improved booting and log-in experience was targeted by Shuttleworth, as well as improved usability on Ubuntu Netbook Edition.
"First impressions count... The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it — we're now beginning the serious push to a new look," he wrote. Shuttleworth said that the exact set of features for Karmic Koala will be defined at the Ubuntu Developer Summit to be held over 25-29 May in Barcelona.
Also over the weekend, Shuttleworth detailed NotifyOSD, an initiative to improve the notification system within Ubuntu.
An example of NotifyOSD in action. (Credit: Canonical)
Shuttleworth said that at least 35 applications will need changes to work with NotifyOSD, with Pidgin and Evolution being the primary targets.
NotifyOSD is currently in the "Jaunty Jackalope" release targeted for April, with additional persistence tools slated for Karmic Koala's release in October 2009.
All this is great! It's pleasing to see that Ubuntu is going in the right direction... Great integration with EC2 will definitely kick some butt on the server side...
On the desktop side, I'd love to see integrated into the distro a way for users (I mean normal users) to personalize their environment. So far, everything is customizable but you still need to have rather good it skills. It should be easy for users to heavily personalize their environment...
I hope we can get up to this point and help in this field with allmyapps ( http://www.allmyapps.com ). So far it's only an appstore like for Linux but we're working towards turning it into a full desktop personalization platform that anybody can use. I think this is one the main things that prevents broader adoption of the linux desktop.