Mark Shuttleworth founder of Ubuntu and his CTO Matt Zimmerman held a press conference this AM to pre-announce the launch of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, which will become available this Thursday April 23rd. Aside from the product details on the upcoming release, Shuttleworth provided insight into what he sees the Oracle buy of Sun means to Ubuntu, and the wider open source ecosystem itself.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has big dreams for Linux. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the progress of Ubuntu, which releases a major update every six months and keeps getting more and more user friendly. But user friendly is just the beginning. Shuttleworth wants Linux to be prettier too.

During a phone briefing today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth described the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop, server and cloud strategy to members of the IT media. WorksWithU tuned in and posed some key questions to Shuttleworth. Here are 10 highlights from the call.

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying $20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world.

"We've read the article at Webupd8.org with Mark Shuttleworth, and here is our opinion on the matter." ... "You have a kernel team because you think you need one, you feel the need to change the kernel. How many serious security flaws have there been in Ubuntu? And how many were specific to Ubuntu? "

"Founder of Ubuntu Linux Mark Shuttleworth took time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about email, productivity, travel, web applications, Ubuntu, free software and much more..."

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, sat for a video interview with Dell Cloud Computing Evangelist Barton George. In it, Shuttleworth takes a "service pack" shot at Windows 7 and covers numerous questions about Canonical's business and cloud strategy. Here's the video - plus some perspectives from WorksWithU.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth on Oct. 26 is set to speak with the press about Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition and Server Edition. WorksWithU will be extra careful not to "hype" Ubuntu 9.10 over the next few days. Instead, we hope to ask Shuttleworth some timely questions about the new Ubuntu and Canonical's long-term business strategy. Here's a sampling of issues on our mind.

Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical (maker of the Ubuntu Linux Distribution) spoke with me at the PyCon 2010 Python conference in Atlanta, GA.