14 DAY TRIAL // The first Ubuntu Live Conference has also brought some very hot news from Ubuntu's creator himself. Mark Shuttleworth, one of the participants at the conference, opened his keynote with an announcement regarding the forthcoming Ubuntu 8.04 release according to which this would be a Long Term Support one.
After speaking about Ubuntu's qualifications for the enterprise market, Mark said that the long-term support he offers for his distro makes it more attractive for the enterprise customers. Enjoying a longer period of support than the others from its species, Ubuntu 6.06 was the first such LTS release and it had quite success due to this particular aspect. At the time Mark was releasing the 6.06 version he was saying that his company hopes to continue the release of LTS versions "approximately every two years".
In his keynote, Shuttleworth has also made another attempt of warning the vendors and especially the developers about the benefits of a regular cycle of releases, similar to Ubuntu and the GNOME Project. Shuttleworth has initially launched such a proposal at the latest Linux Kernel Summit where he said that predictable cycles will make the open software more reliable and attractive to the business customers and outside software vendors.
Based on the famous Debian GNU/Linux, but focused more on usability, regular releases, and ease of use and installation, Ubuntu is mostly a desktop-oriented, for now, Linux distribution, sponsored by Canonical Ltd, which is owned by Mark Shuttleworth. The name ubuntu comes from an ancient African concept which may be briefly rendered by an approximate translation as "humanity towards others". Ubuntu aims to use only free software to provide an up-to-date yet stable operating system for the more common and inexperienced user, but it has also proved to be a very reliable system for developers all over the world.