OStatic

I was never one for cryptozoological taxidermic creations -- you won't find mermonkeys or crocoducks on display in my home. I have, however, for the last few weeks, been hiding a jackalope in my laptop bag. He was an experimental little guy, but the folks at Canonical and the vast community behind Ubuntu have completed the necessary gene splicing and DNA alterations and soon -- very soon -- the final, stable release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be let loose into the wild.

What's new this time around? How does it all work? And for the wilder types, where locally can you attend a Jaunty Jackalope release party?

On Monday, Freescale Semiconductor announced its further plans to forge ahead into the netbook market. Freescale, a major manufacturer of embedded semiconductors, entered the netbook arena in January with its i.MX515 chip and a comprehensive netbook reference design featuring the new-to-ARM Ubuntu Linux platform.

Ubuntu isn't the only open source option for Freescale, however. The company has announced it will also support the Android platform, Xandros Linux, and HyperSpace, an instant-on Linux-based environment.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.