Ubuntu 10.10 to be Maverick Meerkat

Ubuntu 10.10, which will be released in October, has been dubbed Maverick Meerkat by Mark Shuttleworth in a blog posting where he outlined development plans. "This is a time of change and we're not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself" wrote Shuttleworth adding "Once we have released the LTS", 10.04 due at the end of April, "we have plenty of room to shake things up a little".

Picking out netbooks and cloud computing for special emphasis, Shuttleworth said that there will be a revamp of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix's user interface and underlying code to get "The fastest boot, the fastest network connect, the fastest browser". For cloud computing, the plan is to enhance Ubuntu's Enterpise Cloud and make it easier to create, deploy and manage small or large configurations of servers, from the tens to the tens of thousands of nodes. Shuttleworth invited developers to participate in the development of 10.10 and took the opportunity to remind people that the 10.04 LTS is imminent but that "there's still a lot to be done to make the LTS we all want". At no point did Shuttleworth describe the forthcoming development process as "simples".

(djwm)