The new kid on the GNU/Linux block is getting long in the tooth. In about three weeks, Ubuntu will be five years old.
It seems like only yesterday that Warty Warthog was making its debut, to cheers among the crowd who had always wanted a distribution based on the unstable development stream of Debian.
Just over a month from today, Karmic Koala will be out for download, this being the 11th release from Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu.
It will be another proud moment for Mark Shuttleworth, the South African entrepreneur who did what was once considered a crazy thing - adding to the ranks of GNU/Linux distributions in 2004
Shuttleworth has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams as far as usage goes but he still has a few mountains left to climb as he tries to remove the red ink from the Canonical books.
But he is a patient man, has deep pockets and has shown the ability to negotiate skilfully.
His recent major battle has been to try and persuade at least one other major distribution to synchronise releases and I have no doubt that he will finally succeed. After that the landscape will improve markedly.
All the progress made by Ubuntu would not have been possible if the distribution itself had not been good at the core. Karmic Koala is a marked improvement on some earlier releases that I have played around with - and the version I have on my spare box is alpha 6.
Let me caution the Ubuntu fanboys as usual - this is not a review. It is a series of general comments on your favourite toy.
Like all alpha software, there are bugs, and one is certainly prepared for that. For example, I installed the Koala alongside an RC of Windows 7 and GRUB does not offer me an option to boot Windows. That's a sensible thing to do in many ways!
This and other known issues are detailed by the Ubuntu team and hopefully by the time the Koala ambles out on October 29, they will all be fixed.
I'm not sure if there was some kind of aim to make this release snappier, but it certainly feels that way. The use of a 2.6.31 kernel and the ext4 filesystem as the default may have a hand.
There are some problems in running a kernel earlier than 2.6.28 with later versions of xorg and these can slow down things to a crawl at times. But Koala shows none of these symptoms.
Boot time has been markedly improved with the use of Upstart, an Ubuntu development to replace the old Sys V init.
