And it’s codenamed “Karmic Koala”. Mark Shuttleworth writes about what he hopes to achieve with 9.10 server edition and desktop edition:
During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image. Ubuntu-vmbuilder makes it easy to create a custom AMI today, but a portfolio of standard image profiles will allow easier collaboration between people doing similar things on EC2.
EC2 , or Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud, is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. EC2 makes server operation faster by significantly reducing configuration time, and server capacity is elastic, so you only pay for what you need, when you need it.
Or you can make your own cloud, on your own hardware, with the Eucalyptus project.
On the desktop side of things, the focus is on netbooks:
So the good news is, boot will be beautiful. The bad news is, you won’t have long to appreciate it! It only takes 35 days to make a whole Koala, so we think it should be possible to bring up a stylish desktop much faster. The goal for Jaunty on a netbook is 25 seconds, so let’s see how much faster we can get you all the way to a Koala desktop. We’re also hoping to deliver a new login experience that complements the graphical boot, and works well for small groups as well as very large installations.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix is also getting some attention with this development cycle. The developers are shoving Moblin technology into the netbook version of Ubuntu, and considering the Alpha version of Moblin is suppose to be able to boot in 15 seconds, that’s very exciting news.
The default theme for 9.10 may not be brown any more, the new theme(s) will be revealed at the Ubuntu Developers Conference, May 25-29, in Barcelona.
Cloud-computing is a fascinating concept and I am glad to see so much focus on it coming from FOSS community.
