OStatic

April is fast approaching, and that can mean only one thing -- the jackalopes have returned from wherever it is that jackalopes overwinter, and they're making their way to mirrors and torrents near you. The alpha stage of the Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) release is now behind us, and the first beta version was sighted on mirrors worldwide just moments ago.

While the world won't see the official Jackalope release until April 23rd, the Ubuntu team invites any interested in Jackalope (bug) hunting to download the beta version and join the party.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have joined forces to rebuild a community on the prime web real estate known as Linux.com.

In its former life, Linux.com featured a mix of unique content and aggregated stories from the wider Linux community. While it hosted forums and allowed reader comments, it wasn't fully collaborative. Late last year, Linux.com ceased updating the aggregated stories, and at the start of 2009, announced that the original content was also coming to an end, but that other (bigger) plans were afoot. The old Linux.com forum software then replaced the articles on the main page, and many were left puzzled about where on earth this rather memorable domain was headed.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have put the transformation in motion -- but where the domain is headed is very much up to the Linux community. Linux developers and users alike are invited to give their thoughts on the IdeaForge on Linux.com.

Earlier today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced the latest addition to the Ubuntu development ecosystem: the Karmic Koala. This release (also referred to by its scientific classification, Ubuntu 9.10) will be unleashed six months after Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) debuts in April.

Shuttleworth hints creatively at some goals for the Karmic release, and manages to make servers, desktops, and netbooks seem as though they're only a link or two away from koalas on the evolutional chain. The server edition will have a special focus on cloud computing, and will include Amazon EC2 tools as well as (you guessed it) Eucalpytus for creating custom, localized cloud configurations. Karmic Koala's server edition will focus on reducing energy consumption.

Desktop Koalas have some internal genetic alterations -- such as flicker free X initialization (in the spirit of Fedora 10) and boot speeds that suggest jungle cat over arboreal marsupial. Shuttleworth also hints at how different this desktop will look. Will the Karmic Koala break from the traditional Ubuntu brown?

How would you like to get involved in engineering the Koala?

When Google's Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that Chrome would drop the beta designation less than two days ago, the implication was that it would happen pretty quickly. When you consider the length of some beta stages (and drawn out, fanfare driven gold releases), Chrome's 1.0 release yesterday was fast and relatively quiet.

InformationWeek shares a little of my aforementioned concern that taking an application out of the testing stage prematurely can have some serious consequences, and it does offer some insight into Google's thought processes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta.

Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

On Monday, the Mozilla team announced the general availability of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 for testing. Aside from increased localization support, a new Private Browsing mode, new tab switching and preview behaviors, and support for a number of new web technologies (such as the W3C Geolocation API and offline applications), the new beta release uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine by default, and has made tweaks to the Gecko engine to speed content rendering.