The Ubuntu Community has laid its second alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04, alias Jaunty Jackalope, under the Christmas tree.

Mark Shuttleworth is appealing to community members to send him screenshots of their standard 1024x768 desktops. His aim is to collect ideas that will improve the desktop experience.

Sun Microsystems have announced a Reference Design Kit for the Ultrasparc T2 with an E-ATX board and processor that works with Linux.

Chipmaker Intel is currently working on Linux support for its next generation of USB, version 3.0. The new bus specification promises a 5 Gbit per second transfer speed, ten times faster than USB 2.0.

The many years of hard work and reverse engineering that went into developing the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards have finally paid off. Nouveau is now included in the repository of the next Ubuntu 9.04 release.

Bazaar, the open source distributed version control system software has been released in version 1.10.

Just a month after the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the first alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 has become available. The next distro version should boot more quickly, require less power, integrate more web services and include a backup solution.

Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR), based on Ubuntu 8.04 (LTS), is a live, read-only CD that seals off your private data from the outside world. It does this using encryption and isolation methods.