Yes, we can! Robbie Williamson, Engineering Manager at Canonical and an influential voice in Ubuntu’s release schedule, responded on his blog to Mark Shuttleworth’s call to see if we could release 10.10 on 10/10/10 (which, if thought of as the binary number 101010 would equal 42, every geek’s favorite number). Take a look.

Do you like it when your operating system “just works?” I do. This does not happen easily or without hard work. Ubuntu has a wonderful QA team that has a systematic method of testing releases on diverse hardware platforms. However, they don’t own every piece of equipment out there. This doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Anyone who is willing to do a little bit of work and follow some very clearly outlined procedures may become a part of the team and help make releases better. Interested? Take a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing for ways that community members can join the Testing Team and http://qa.ubuntu.com/ for information on the QA Team. These two groups work together toward the common goal of making Ubuntu releases the best they can be through finding bugs, reporting them, and helping find problems on an even wider set of hardware.

For those who hadn’t seen it and want to.

There is a new initiative from the Canonical/Ubuntu Design Team to do a much better job communicating their thoughts, ideas and plans to the wider community. They have started a blog at http://design.canonical.com/ that I believe is worth reading regularly. Fire up your RSS feed reader and subscribe after taking a look at the wonderful foundation they have created to kick things off.

EDIT:  I should mention that the main way that the Design Team communicates is via the ayatana mailing list. You can find it here: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana

Enjoy!

This number will mean something if we can make it happen. I’m sold. Let’s do it!

I’m sitting in one of the first sessions of Ubuntu UDS for the upcoming 10.10 release listening to Mark Shuttleworth speak about the philosophy and future of the distribution. This is going to be an amazing release with a ton of new development and goodies. Since 10.04 LTS was just released and is a Long Term Support release, the focus was to release a version that could be supported for a long time and which had more of a focus on software options and sources that will be stable and consistent for two years. The focus on 10.10 will be innovation of a new foundation on which to build in preparation for the next LTS in 2010. More to come.

If you want to join in on a session, you may do so remotely and your participation is welcome.

I just received my copy of Ubuntu Up and Running. I had the privilege of being one of the tech reviewers, so consider this more of an announcement than a review (as well as an invitation to take a look and see if the book interests you–Robin Nixon is a good writer). It is similar in focus to another book that I have contributed to heavily, The Official Ubuntu Book; (5th Ed coming very soon!). Both are aimed at being an introduction of Ubuntu to people new to Linux, but each covers the topic differently and in differing depth and each has information that the other does not.

Just a quick reminder that you can still nominate somebody (that includes yourself) for the Regional Membership Boards EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) or Asia / Oceania until 12:00 UTC today. I have enjoyed my two years as a part of the EMEA board, but am not standing for reelection to make way for new people to participate.

(Abridged from the announcement on The Fridge)

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support). Codenamed “Lucid Lynx”, 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

We are also pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition, which is not a long-term support release.

Read more about the features of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in the following press releases:

Desktop and Netbook editions http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-edition
Server edition http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-10.04-server-edition

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be supported for three years on desktops and five years on servers. Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition will be supported for 18 months.

Thanks to the efforts of the global translation community, Ubuntu is available in 29 languages. For a list of supported languages and detailed translation statistics for these and other languages, see:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~dpm/ubuntu-10.04-translation-stats.html

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is also the basis for new 10.04 releases of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and Mythbuntu:

Kubuntu http://kubuntu.org/news/10.04-lts-release
Xubuntu http://xubuntu.org/news/10.04-release
Edubuntu http://edubuntu.org/news/10.04-release
Mythbuntu http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/release
Ubuntu Studio https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio/10.04release_notes

To Get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
———————————-

To download Ubuntu 10.04, or obtain CDs, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu

Users of Ubuntu 9.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 10.04 LTS via Update Manager. For further information about upgrading, see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Users of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS may wish to wait for 10.04.1 LTS, due in July 2010, before upgrading.

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats and workarounds for known issues. They are available at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004

Find out what’s new in this release with a graphical overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004overview