Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind the most popular Linux distribution today, announced the name of the next version of Ubuntu Linux (version 7.10), Gutsy Gibbon:

"Folks, allow me to introduce the Gutsy Gibbon, who will be succeeding the Feisty Fawn as the focus of our development love in a few short weeks, for release in October 2007.

The release schedule for Gutsy Gibbon was also made public. The development will start in 1 week after Feisty Fawn will be released (on April 19th) and it will end somewhere around October 18th.

￭ April 26th - Toolchain Uploaded
￭ May 10th - Development Summit
￭ May 31st - Specifications must be finalized
￭ June 7th - Tribe CD 1 (first alpha release)
￭ June 28st - Tribe CD 2 (second alpha release)
￭ July 26th - Tribe CD 3 (third alpha release)
￭ August 9th - Tribe CD 4 (fourth alpha release)
￭ August 23rd - Tribe CD 5 (fifth alpha release)
￭ September 6th - Tribe CD 6 (sixth alpha release)
￭ September 27th - Beta Release
￭ October 11th - Release Candidate
￭ October 18th - Final Release

As Mark says, the Gibbon win the race as the mascot for the next release of Ubuntu Linux: "The Gibbon won the G-race to be our engineering mascot for this next release, but it was a close run. We very much wanted to honour the
tremendous contributions of the GNU project to Free Software by awarding the role to the Glossy Gnu. [...] In the end, however, the judge, jury and elocutionary (that would be me) took a liking to the Gibbon's extraordinary reach, and the Gibbon won outright."

While Mark promises us that Gutsy Gibbon will be even much simpler to install than its predecessors, faster than ever before and (maybe) composite will finally be default, this version will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release.

You can read the full announcement here.

About Ubuntu:

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default, every other package you can imagine available from the network and professional technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world.

You can download the Beta version on Ubuntu 7.04 (for testing purposes only) now from Softpedia.

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