Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat

[Jono Bacon]

Hi All,

I just want to re-post Mark announcement of the 10.10 name here so
everyone is up to speed:

        It’s time to put our heads together to envision “the perfect
        10″.
        
        This is a time of great innovation and change in the Linux
        world, with major new initiatives from powerful groups bringing
        lots of new ideas, new energy and new code. Thanks to the
        combined efforts of Google, Intel, IBM, Canonical, Red Hat,
        Oracle, Cisco, ARM, many other companies, Debian and other
        projects, a hundred startups and tens of thousands of
        professional and inspired contributors, the open source
        ecosystem continues to accelerate. We need to bring the best of
        all of that work into focus and into the archive. For millions
        of users, Ubuntu represents what Free Software can do out of the
        box for them. We owe it to everybody who works on Free Software
        to make that a great experience.
        
        At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, in May in Belgium, we’ll have a
        new design track, and a “cloud and server” track, reflecting
        some major focal points in 2010. They will complement our
        ongoing work on community, desktop, kernel, quality assurance,
        foundations and mobile.
        
        Our new theme is “Light”, and the next cycle will embrace that
        at many levels. We have a continued interest in netbooks, and
        we’ll revamp the Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface. As
        computers become lighter they become more mobile, and we’ll work
        to keep people connected, all day, everywhere. We’ll embrace the
        web, aiming for the lightest, fastest web experience on any
        platform. The fastest boot, the fastest network connect, the
        fastest browser. Our goal is to ensure that UNE is far and away
        the best desktop OS for a netbook, both for consumers and power
        users.
        
        On the other end of the spectrum, we’ll be lightening the burden
        of enterprise deployment with our emphasis on hybrid cloud
        computing. Ubuntu Server is already very popular on public
        clouds like EC2 and Rackspace, and now that Dell supports the
        Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud for private cloud infrastructure, it’s
        possible to build workloads that run equally well in your data
        center or on the cloud. We’ll focus on making it even easier to
        build those workloads and keep them up to date, and managing the
        configurations of tens, or tens of thousands, of Ubuntu machines
        running in the cloud.
        
        It’s not all about work. We don’t just want to be connected to
        the internet, we want to be connected to each other. Social from
        the Start is our initiative to make the desktop a collaborative,
        social place. For the past five years, we’ve all been shifting
        more and more data into the web, to a series of accounts and
        networks elsewhere. Now it’s time to start to bring those social
        networks back into our everyday computing environment. Our
        addressbooks and contact lists need to be synchronized and
        shared, so that we have the latest information everywhere – from
        mobile phones to web accounts.
        
        So there’s a lot to do. I hope you’ll join us in shaping that
        work.

        Introducing the Maverick Meerkat
        
        Our mascot for 10.10 is the Maverick Meerkat.
        
        This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise
        people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic
        improvement presents itself. We want to put Ubuntu and free
        software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major
        manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move. We will deliver on
        time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver
        this cycle. Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room
        to shake things up a little. Let’s hear the best ideas, gather
        the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the
        next two year major cycle.
        
        Meerkats are, of course, light, fast and social – everything we
        want in a Perfect 10. We’re booting really fast these days, but
        the final push remains. Changes in the toolchain may make us
        even faster for every application. We’re Social from the Start,
        but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring
        social features into even more applications. Meerkats are
        family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe
        and efficient solution for all the family netbooks. They are
        also clever – meerkats teach one another new skills. And that’s
        what makes this such a great community.

        Here’s looking at the Lynx
        
        Lucid is shaping up beautifully, but there’s still a lot to be
        done to make it the LTS we all want. Thanks to everyone who is
        bringing their time, energy and expertise to bear on making it
        outstanding. And I’m looking forward to the release parties, the
        brainstorming at UDS, and further steps on our mission to bring
        free software to the world, on free terms.
        
Originally posted at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/336

Thanks!

	Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
www.ubuntu.com / www.jonobacon.org
www.identi.ca/jonobacon www.twitter.com/jonobacon