I’ve been really silent lately and I haven’t communicated much with the community on what I was working on and what was happening. I was in France this summer on a 3 months unpaid leave. This gave me the opportunity to see how my life would be affected if I was to leave my job and I’m happy to say the experiment was a total success.

The development of Ubuntu 10.04 has been underway for nearly two months now, and will produce our third long-term (LTS) release in April. What I want to talk about, though, is not the individual projects we’re working on. I want to explain how the whole thing comes together, and what’s happening behind the scenes to make 10.04 LTS different from other Ubuntu releases.

The release of FFmpeg 0.5 last March was significant as it was the first official release in quite a while for this popular and widely used free software media program. Fifteen months later, FFmpeg 0.6 has been released with plenty of changes including support for Google's VP8 codec / WebM and improvements for HTML5/H.264 video playback.

Well there you have it, Awn 0.2 has been released!

With over six months since the last release, you'd think we were working on something as complicated as Gnome, but I think there are enough new features to show where the time has gone ;-).

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.32, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform. Released on schedule, to the day, GNOME 2.32 builds on top of a long series of successful six months releases to offer the best experience to users and developers.

Lead kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 2.6.28 on Wednesday. The new version introduces some noteworthy changes that will put the kernel in a strong position for growth and advancement in the coming year. This latest release follows a few months after version 2.6.27, which was released in October.

After months and months and months of hard work, I am happy to say that Sabayon Linux 3.5 final will enter the final beta testing stage within 48 hours and will stay there for a couple of weeks. All I can say is that the difference between 3.4 and 3.5 is REALLY REALLY huge.

Yapsi -- a Perl 6 compiler written in Perl 6 itself is released. Yapsi is an 'official and complete' Perl 6 release. It's official because authors have little labels with the word 'official' on them that they glue to each download that takes off from github. It's complete in the sense that all of the things it implements, it does.

"So, while Zac has been keeping everyone distracted with new portage-2.1 releases over the last months I've been mostly working on the new features in trunk, which will become portage-2.2, and I think it's time to give a short preview about things to expect as we plan to release it before the end of the year, so the feature set probably won't change much from now on..."