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.

Perhaps Mark Shuttleworth is right when he so gleefully welcomes the release of Windows 7.  Ever since Vista was released on January 31st, 2007, Linux has been gaining a lot of steam, thanks to Vista’s many pitfalls.

Ubuntu is without a doubt leading the charge when it comes to proliferation of the Linux kernel, and thanks to the popularity of netbooks, Linux is fastly becoming the operating system of choice for many netbook users.

Microsoft isn’t comfortable with this trend.

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If the current economic crisis hasn’t already become evident maybe this will change your mind. As more and more of us have to tighten our financial belts, we look to every corner of our lives to save money. We cut back on phone services, eating out, entertainment, and new purchases. For most of us shelling out 400-800 dollars for a new computer or 200 dollars for the highly anticipated Windows 7 is not at the top of our to-do list.

This is a prime time for Ubuntu and other free alternatives to take root, why not keep your current hardware, and get more functionality out of it. There has always been an argument that Linux is not friendly enough, and “that’s for geeks I couldn’t understand that”. Well fair enough it’s something different, but if anything it’s easier to learn. Recently a new guide has come out that gives users foreign to anything beyond windows the opportunity to shorten the learning curve. The full version is available for free for those cost conscious to download in a PDF, and in book form from Amazon.

With the latest versions of windows making changes to the ways users navigate through the OS now is the best time to give alternatives a shot. Just keep one thing in mind before you click away, and forget that you read this. What do you have to loose from downloading the guide and the OS below. If you don’t like it then you can go spend money, but once you buy that coveted shiny box labeled windows you have paid your money, and cannot get it back.

Click here to Download the Guide

Click here to Download Ubuntu

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The Alpha 3 Build of Ubuntu “Jaunty Jackalope” 9.04 boots in 21.4 seconds, but there is a catch.  The fast boot time is due to the new Ext 4 file system which is a declared stable, but will not be the default file system of 9.04.

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