Cody Taylor

Remember the sweet mockup? Well now it’s in the alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”, for real.

Mark Shuttleworth : “When you are looking for inspiration beyond the looming Jaunty feature freeze, I hope you’ll think of the Koala, our official mascot for Ubuntu 9.10. And if you’ll bear with me for a minute I’ll set the scene for what we hope to achieve in that time.”

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Mark Shuttleworth has announced the next release in their horrible alliterative family, “Karmic Koala”. The new version hopes to include a newer, shinier, faster startup, better small screen support, a spruced up desktop look (no more brown), and many minor tweaks and updates. “A newborn Koala spends about six months in the family before it heads off into the wild alone. Sounds about perfect for an Ubuntu release plan! I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Barcelona, and before that, at a Jaunty release party. Till then, cheers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Novell’s OpenSUSE, one of the Linux world’s most prominent distributions, hit Version 11.1 late in 2008, sporting a renewed focus on community involvement.

One of Ubuntu’s strategies for gaining a larger user base is providing quality, comprehensive training for everyone who desires. For that purpose, Canonical has recently included Fast Lane and Bridge Education.

For the first time, HP will soon be supporting Ubuntu Linux on one of its server lines.

vidia 180.29, offers full OpenGL 3.0 support for all GeForce 8 and newer graphics cards. It also provides support for the following GPUs: GeForce 9300 GE and Quadro NVS 420. The Nvidia 180.29 video driver was also updated yesterday, by the Ubuntu developers, in the daily build of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

An anonymous reader writes “Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The HP Mini MI netbook provides one of the slickest available Ubuntu GUIs. Hobbyists have now figured out how to install that pretty GUI on non-Mi platforms.

Since I’ve been having serious problems with satellite all week, DeviceGuru’s submission was really interesting to me. He sats “Inspired by Roku’s awesome Netflix video download box and impressed with Boxee’s free A/V media center platform, it was merely a matter of time before DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum would create the BoxeeBox, an Ubuntu-powered HTPC with Boxee serving as its primary media center UI. Based on a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, the BoxeeBox has the look and feel of consumer A/V equipment and packs 2GB RAM, 1TB HDD, CD/DVD drive, USB, Firewire, HDMI, DVI-D, RGB, and 8-channel surround sound audio.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.