First Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) alpha hops into view

The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April.

The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements.

In addition to the ongoing long-term usability enhancement efforts, Canonical and the Ubuntu development community are focusing on several specific technical goals for 9.04, including improving performance and boot time and integrating web services more tightly with the desktop.

A particularly exciting community-driven effort for Ubuntu 9.04 is the jump to Mono 2.0, a major update of the open source .NET implementation that was recently released by Novell. The Mono stack comes with some very complex dependencies that make it a bit challenging to package properly. Members of the community have responded by proposing a Mono 2.0 transitioning initiative that will involve close collaboration between Ubuntu and upstream Debian packagers. The goal is to transition all of the major Mono packages to 2.0 dependencies—a move that will help save space on the installable Live CD image.

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Ubuntu 9.04 is still at a very early stage of development and little of that work has fallen into place yet. More specific timelines should emerge next month during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View. The big priority during the first part of a new Ubuntu development cycle is merging in new and updated packages from Debian—this step has already been completed.

According to developer Colin Watson, who announced the alpha release on an Ubuntu mailing list on Saturday, progress has also been made on the new Ubuntu ARM port. Canonical's ARM porting effort was revealed earlier this month; it will be used to bring Ubuntu to mobile Internet devices and upcoming ARM-based netbook products. It is still a work in progress, however, and no ARM installation images are available yet.

Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1 is available for download from the Ubuntu web site, although only the server CD image and the text-based "alternate" CD image were built for the release. If you want an installable Live CD, you can get the latest daily image. I tested the alpha by installing the alternate CD image in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The differences between 8.10 and 9.04 alpha 1 aren't really going to be apparent to regular users at this stage and it isn't ready yet for production use—it's primarily offered for testing purposes and for developers.

"This is the very first roughly working set of images off the production line, and they haven't all been tested, so you should expect some bugs," wrote Watson in the release announcement. "Prominent among these are that some of the images are oversized and can only be tested using a DVD or a virtual machine, and that the desktop CD isn't ready yet!"

The next major alpha release is scheduled for December 18, shortly after the developer summit. The final Debian package import freeze for 9.04 will be on Christmas day. Additional prereleases will follow until the final release arrives on April 23.