Ubuntu In Final Test Release

With just one week to go to the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, the Ubuntu development team has announced a release candidate of the operating system. The release candidate version has no major new changes over the previous beta releases but rather stabilizes its existing features.

Key features of Ubuntu 9.04 include faster boot times, a new notification system and ext4 filesystem support. Many of the major desktop changes come from the inclusion of Gnome 2.26 which better integrates Brasero as the default CD burning application and, perhaps most importantly, significant changes to Evolution to make the email client work better with Microsoft's Exchange server.

On the server, Ubuntu 9.04 includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a first step towards integrating cloud computing into the distribution using Eucalyptus. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is also compatible with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) but can be run onsite behind corporate firewalls.

For the netbook market, Ubuntu Remix boosts boot-up times, sports a simplified interface and is known to support Asus Eee PC 900, Acer Aspire One and Dell Mini 9 netbooks.

The KDE version of Jaunty, Kubuntu, includes KDE 4.2 and Xubuntu includes the newly-released Xfce 4.6.

The final release of Ubuntu 9.04 is scheduled for April 23.