New Ubuntu 9.10 Release Available
As another October draws to a close it’s time for another of Canonical’s scheduled releases of Ubuntu, this time version 9.10, codename Karmic Koala. Next April will see 10.04, or “Lucid Lynx”, released which is the next Long Term Support version providing 3 years of desktop patches, and 5 years of server patches.
You can read the official announcements here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-910 (Desktop)
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-910-server-edition (Server)
With the release of 9.10, 7.10 has now reached the end of it’s life cycle and thus can no longer be supported by our Patches and Updates solution. Whilst it’s possible to use “aptitude dist-upgrade” to bring an Ubuntu (or Debian) box up to the latest version it’s not something we’d particularly recommend. The best bet is to do a full re-install.
9.10 brings some interesting new features to the fold, aimed at desktops is the use of “sreadahead” to dramatically boost boot times (<12 seconds on an SSD drive), a switch to Empathy instead of Pidgin by default and integrated Ubuntu One, Canonical’s cloud service backup and file sharing solution.
On the server side possibly the most interesting is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which utilises Eucalyptus to provide a full cloud environment with Amazon Web Services compatible API to easily enable companies to set up private clouds (or indeed sell public ones) If you really want to there is an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) of this release enabling you to create private cloud nodes using a public cloud server, alongside the usual upgrades such as mysql-server version 5.1.37 and PHP 5.2.10
