On Monday September 8th 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the lead Ubuntero behind one of the most popular Linux distributions yet introduced some goals for the April 2009 release titled Jaunty Jackalope. Shuttleworth summed up two big points: faster boot time and cloud computing with ‘weblications.’
On the eve of the release of Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu 8.10, Shuttleworth has already propelled the next version forward by setting some goals for the features to be included, including incrimenting the naming scheme by one letter to ‘J.’ Thus is born The Jaunty Jackalope. Included in Jaunty’s featureset thought up by Shuttleworth and crew are 5 major points:
- Decrease boot time and resume time
- Focus on embracing cloud computing and storage
- Focus on user interface enhancements and refinement
- Import entire Ubuntu code into Bazaar
- Focus on working more with upstream developers
These are some great base goals. Laptop usage has been on the rise, and the adoption of netbook-class devices can surely benefit from decreased boot times. Since power management doesn’t take over almost until the desktop environment has been loaded this will help a little with battery life. However, suspend and resume still need alot of work from both hardware manufacturers and kernel developers. ACPI implementations are still “buggy” due to manufacturers including Windows-specific code in their BIOS images. Until Linux gains a greater market share these shortcuts for Windows won’t really go away, so hopefully a way can be found to circumvent this.
While cloud computing and weblications are still new, embracing them for devices that are always connected to the Internet is a great idea. However, I don’t think it should be a primary goal for Jaunty. Setting up a good base for 9.04 and seeing where this new technology goes for 9.10 would be a much better usage of resources so Ubuntu contributors can focus on more important features. Personally, I’d rather use applications installed on my hard drive than those available online, and I would assume most people still fall into that category.
Mark Shuttleworth laid down the gauntlet and said Ubuntu will be able to compete with the likes of Apple and Microsoft in 2009. This is quite a lofty goal, but too many things need to go right for this to happen. Its very possible that Jaunty Jackalope can really start this process, but getting people to trust Linux, and being able to use it as easily as Windows or OS X is still quite far off. Look for a future article about usability between the 3 OS’s.
Bazaar is Canonical’s distributed version control system. With 9.04, Canonical wants to upload every package included with Ubuntu so developers can branch it at any time. This will help to spur innovation and really get the concept of PPAs buzzing. Bazaar’s ability to import and export from and to SVN, CVS, and Git will also help upstream developers. Not to mention, Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical is going to start contributing code via hired developers to some of the low-level components such as X, Gtk, Qt, Gnome, and KDE.
What other features and innovations should Jaunty Jackalope strive to incorporate?
