Ubuntu is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. The next version of Ubuntu will be arriving in April. This release has been code named Jaunty Jackalope.

Mark Shuttleworth picked this name because he plans on focusing on speed for the release. For those of you that don't know, Mark is the founder of Canonical and the primary driver behind Ubuntu. He is known as the "Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life."

What will be so great about this next version of Ubuntu? After reading this article and running the current Alpha release on my system I have a few words to say about it.

Currently the two most notable changes are the boot time and file system capabilities.

Jaunty will ship with the newest kernel which means Ext4 will be available as a file system choice. This new fs is capable of managing volume sizes of up to one exabyte. ( 1 exabyte = 1,048,576 terabytes ) Note that's terabyte, not gigabyte. Ext4 offers a user to have up to 16 terabyte files. It's insanely large, however it is a great idea considering that technology will someday possibly grow to require this. Even if it's not in our lifetime. Ext4 also boasts a fast system and extremely fast file system checks. These checks are capable of running up to 200 times faster than previously.

In addition, Ext4 is able to detect SSD and do some various tweaks to maximize the life of the drive. This is excellent news for net-books such as the Asus EEE PC. It will also be able to provide file system checking while the drive is still in use which no other file system offers.

Although this isn't Ubuntu specific, it is related. Without Ubuntu, this file system would not yet be introduced to the market. Of course Ext4 would also not be possible without the kernel which comes from Linus Torvalds and his company.

The second point of Jaunty is the boot time. A full GUI installation with all background services running such as the Evolution backend running on a system w/ a 1.5GHz single core processor and 512MB RAM is capable of booting entirely in 21.4 seconds. This seems like a very fast boot time. Some claim that Windows 7 will be a contender to this however my personal experience with Win7 is that 9.04 booted significantly quicker.

After doing an initial setup I performed my own setup. I like focusing on installing only what I actually need and not running a lot of extra services in the background. These things help Ubuntu be the most user friendly system however it's not made to my liking. After I do my own setup of Ubuntu, it boots in under 10 seconds. This stop watch measure was stopped after the the login screen loads.

A small note worthy change is with PulseAudio. If you've ever had an application such as flash running in firefox that doesn't offer a volume control, you know how annoying they are. This volume will be able to be controlled by other media players such as totem.

Is that all? Of course not. Jaunty is still only at Alpha 3. Not even a beta release is being considered at this point. There is a rumor that Jaunty will be able to do a 10 second boot with a full setup. In my book, that's very impressive.

Get ready for yet another great release of Ubuntu from Canonical. Ubuntu is here and it only gets better with every single release. Current release date is scheduled for April 23rd, 2009. It will be obtainable from ubuntu.com. Don't expect to get much bandwidth for yourself though, every release brings many servers and ISP's to their knees.

--- Side Note ---
If you're interested, I've been talking to Tom Halverson about a private release mirror on campus. If you're interested, please send him an email stating that you would be very interested in a release mirror that you can access from DSU. Remember, Ubuntu can be downloaded and run without installing to your system. The performance suffers but you're still able to see what they've done. Just let him know that you would like to see DSU host a mirror for you to download Ubuntu when it's released. Be sure to reference "Michael Lustfield" so he doesn't think you're saying this just out of the blue.