Development plans for Ubuntu 7.10 (codenamed Gutsy Gibbon) were announced last night on the Ubuntu development mailing list. Scheduled for official release in late October, Gutsy Gibbon will include version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 2.20, and Xorg 7.3. Kubuntu 7.10 will feature KDE 3.5.7 and offer optional packages for KDE 4.0 RC2.

My heart sank a little bit as I sat through 2-3 minutes of what can only be described as 'error messages' while this early release of Gutsy Gibbon booted on my virtual machine - although it came through in the end. Here we have the Alpha 2 release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon for me to cast a preliminary eye over 3 months prior to release.

"You can now download the Alpha two release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, remember that this is not a stable release, so use it only for testing purposes."

There's a month to go before the next Ubuntu release, 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon, hits the download servers. A September 4 daily build shows a number of improvements over the 7.04 release which was named Feisty Fawn.

It took me a while to upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 because Ubuntu servers were so busy. It would even time-out at times. But now it’s done, Gutsy Gibbon is turning out to be a very solid release. I’ve been using Ubuntu since 6.04 and it has definitely gone a long way!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I know that I enjoyed the days off of school, and thankfully having nothing better to do than finally install the latest Ubuntu: 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon." So onwards now, lets see how it fared:

Ubuntu 7.10 is the current DEVELOPMENT version of the Ubuntu operating system. It will be released October 18th, 2007. The common name given to this release from the time of its early development was "Gutsy Gibbon".

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Release Candidate for version 7.10 of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, and Xubuntu codenamed “Gutsy Gibbon”. The Release Candidate includes installable live Desktop CDs, server images,alternate text-mode installation CDs, and an upgrade wizard for users of the current stable release..."

Out of all of the Ubuntu derivative distributions, the one that's received the least amount of attention really has been Edubuntu. With a slogan of "Linux for Young Human Beings", Edubuntu is a Linux distribution designed for students and use in school environments.