Ever since Ubuntu released its first version, its been known for its strange and interesting choice of names! Ubuntu, in African means “humanity towards others” and what could be a better name for an opensource community project!
The first version of Ubuntu was Ubuntu 4.10 called “Warty Warthog“, whoa what a name! It was released in October 2004 which is why the first version was 4.10 and not 1.something… It was called so as it was their first release and they thought it was a bit warty! So how did this name come into being??? Here’s how…
lifeless: how long before we make a first release?
sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max.
lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish.
sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release.
lifeless is Robert Collins. sabdfl is Mark Shuttleworth.
Then came Ubuntu 5.04 called “Hoary Hedgehog” released in April 2005. This was because they wanted to stick to the “hog” names! This literally meant “covered with hair” (yuck!) but silently signified a version of Ubuntu that was wiser and more mature, being their second release…
The third Ubuntu release had a very classy name indeed… “Breezy Badger“, Ubuntu 5.10 was released in October 2005 and pointed out something fresh, brisk and full of life. It was originally supposed to be called “Bendy Badger” which was actually a very cool name in itself but finally settled with “breezy” because of its ease of upgrade. Actually they had another contender for the name- Grumpy Groundhog but din’t want to name an awesome looking distro grumpy! Grumpy Groundhog is still a surprise piece of Ubuntu and not much is known about it…
Next came Ubuntu 6.06… “Dapper Drake” – neat, trim and smart! For this release, the community committed supporting it for 3 years on desktop and 5 years on the server. In Mark Shuttleworth’s words…
It's 6.04 that will be up against Windows Vista, so let's make it a
zinger and give folks a real choice.
The 6.04 release will be the culmination of 2 years hard work, with Warty, Hoary and Breezy having set the style and the pace. We want it toDapper Drake represent the fruit of that labour - it brings to a close this first major cycle of development for Ubuntu. It will be a release that people can plan for, participate in and build solutions on top of. It will get even more polish than we put into Breezy, so we think it deserves a name that reflects that polish.
The next release for Ubuntu was “Edgy Eft” or Ubuntu 6.10… It can be explained in 4 four words as Fire up the crackpipes! (?!). It was named so because Edgy was believed to be the cutting edge of brand new code and infrastructure… Some new features included usinf Xen for virtualization, Xgl/AIGLX for wobbly window effects, multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, a Network Manager and other interesting features.
Then came our very own 7.04 released in April 2007, popularly known as “Feisty Fawn“… This is one of the most stable Ubuntu release. Courage and restlessness are two words that summarize Feisty… like a young deer who sets out to explore the new and exciting world! Feisty is more to do with features that are visible to the end user- like desktop effects and other emerging desktop technologies.
Now we come to the most awaited release of Ubuntu just a few days away… say hello to “Gutsy Gibbon” – Ubuntu 7.10! Well Gutsy won the race putting behind contenders Feiry Fox and Icy Weasel. According to Mark Shuttleworth,
Our Gutsy is an expert in brachiation, which is apt for a project that needs to navigate a complicated forest of branches very quickly.
While Ubuntu is by no means the 800-pound gorilla in the server game, the Gibbon will show that lean and mean count for something! Agility of deployment, together with integrated management will be a focus for the Ubuntu server team. Gutsy will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release, but it will nonetheless see a lot of server work and be useful for fast-moving server deployments.
Everyone’s waiting for Gutsy and so am I!
While Gutsy is still not out, the Ubuntu community went out to announce the name for its next release- 8.04 due in April 2008. While most people wanted Hungry Hippo, the codename decided is “Hardy Heron”. Not much is known about this release though its going to be an LTS release with 3 years support on the desktop and 5 years on the server.
So for all those of you who wondered what’s with the funky naming system Ubuntu is famous for, here’s it!
