Over a short period of time, three major operating system releases will take place. From Apple, Mac OS X 10.6 (also known as Snow Leopard) will ship on August 28,2009. From Microsoft, Windows 7 has already been released to manufacturers, with general retail availability set for October of this year. Representing Linux, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is also slated for an October 2009 release.

Apple will release its OS X 10.6 “Snow Loepard” in September and not long after, on October 22nd, Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be released. A week later Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is scheduled to be unleashed.

The install screen for Ubuntu 9.10, or Karmic Koala, which comes sniffing at the heels of Apple Snow Leopard and Microsoft Windows 7. That said, there is always a new or recent Ubuntu: the team puts out a new release every six months.

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is meant to be the most important Ubuntu release yet. Not because it brings in a new plethora or breakthrough technology innovations or saves the world hunger; but because it comes head to head with the flawless Snow Leopard and the much anticipated Windows 7.

Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Microsoft's Windows 7 are expected to debut within days of one another in October 2009. Some open source pundits will surely hype a showdown between the two operating systems. But Canonical will need to carefully communicate the broader Ubuntu 9.10 story to media, customers and partners.

Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was open-sourced under the Apache license last month by Apple and now it has worked its way into FreeBSD. This software, which helps in optimizing applications for multi-core systems, has ported the libdispatch library from GCD to FreeBSD and made Grand Central Dispatch more POSIX friendly.

Karmic Koala is scheduled to be released on October this year, while its rival Windows 7 is going to kick start at the end of the year. Both releases offer impressive features, but will Ubuntu 9.10 stand up against Windows 7.

The Ubuntu development team unleashed the fourth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, which is scheduled for release in late October this year. In this release, Firefox 3.5 replaced the old Firefox 3.0 as the default web browser! The actual version of Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Alpha 4 is 3.5.2.

Another interesting addition...