The naming of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) was announced on 17 August 2010 by Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal was released on 28 April 2011. It is Canonical's 14th release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 11.04 used the Unity user interface instead of GNOME 2 as default. The move to Unity was controversial as some GNOME developers feared it would fracture the community and marginalize GNOME Shell. The GNOME desktop environment is still available in Ubuntu 11.04 under the title Ubuntu Classic as a fallback to Unity. Ubuntu 11.04 employed Banshee as the default music player, replacing Rhythmbox. Other new applications included Mozilla Firefox 4 and LibreOffice, which replaced OpenOffice.org. The OpenStack cloud computing platform was added in this release. Starting with Ubuntu 11.04, the Ubuntu Netbook Edition was merged into the desktop edition. In reviewing Ubuntu 11.04 upon its stable release, Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said "There is a lot to like in Ubuntu 11.04, but also a lot of room for improvement." Jesse Smith of DistroWatch said "I'm of the opinion there are good features in this release, but 11.04 definitely suffered from being rushed out the door while it was still beta quality. Ubuntu aims to be novice-friendly, but this release is buggy and I think they missed the mark this time around. I'm limiting my recommendation of 11.04 to people who want to play with an early release of Unity." Support for Ubuntu 11.04 officially ended on 28 October 2012.
Named for the green three-eyed aliens. The release was frozen on August 6, 2010, with many of the Debian developers gathered at the 10th DebConf at New York City. While two architectures (alpha and hppa) were dropped, two architectures of the new FreeBSD port (kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64) were made available as technology preview, including the kernel and userland tools as well as common server software (though not advanced desktop features yet). This was the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel. The new release introduced a dependency based boot sequence, which allowed for parallel init script processing, speeding system startup.
The naming of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) was announced by Mark Shuttleworth on 2 April 2010, along with the release's goals of improving the netbook experience and a server focus on hybrid cloud computing. Ubuntu 10.10 was released on 10 October 2010 (10.10.10) at around 10:10 UTC. This is a departure from the traditional schedule of releasing at the end of October to get "the perfect 10", and a playful reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, since, in binary, 101010 is equal to the number 42, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" within the series. It was Canonical's 13th release of Ubuntu. New features included the new Unity interface for the Netbook Edition, a new default photo manager, Shotwell, replacing F-Spot, the ability to purchase applications in the Software Center, and an official Ubuntu font used by default. Support for Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat 10.10 was officially ended on 10 April 2012.
Shuttleworth first announced Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on 19 September 2009 at the Atlanta Linux Fest; Canonical released it on 29 April 2010. It was Canonical's 12th release of Ubuntu and the third long-term support (LTS) release. The new release included, among other things, improved support for Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers, while switching to the open source Nvidia graphics driver, Nouveau, by default. Plymouth was also introduced, allowing boot animations. It also included a video editor for the first time, Pitivi. GIMP was removed from the Lucid installation CD due to its professional-grade complexity and its file size. F-Spot provided normal user-level graphics-editing capabilities and GIMP remained available for download in the repositories. The distribution emphasized the increasing importance of Web services and of social networking services with integrated interfaces for posting to sites like Facebook and Twitter, complementing the IM and email integration already in Ubuntu. On 4 March 2010 it was announced that Lucid Lynx would feature a new theme, including new logos, taking Ubuntu's new visual style into account: The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of "Light". We're drawn to Light, because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that "light" is a good value in software. Good software is "light" in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too. Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort. Historical perspective: From 2004–2010, the theme in Ubuntu was "Human". Our tagline was "Linux for Human Beings" and we used a palette reflective of the full range of humanity. Our focus as a project was bringing Linux from the data center into the lives of our friends and global family. The new theme met with mixed critical responses. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul said: "The new themes and updated color palette are nice improvement for Ubuntu ... After testing the new theme for several hours, I feel like it's a step forward, but it still falls a bit short of my expectations." Paul also noted that the most controversial aspect of the new design amongst users was the placement of the window-control buttons on the left instead of on the right side of the windows. TechSource's Jun Auza expressed concern that the new theme was too close to that used by Apple's Mac OS X: "I think Ubuntu is having an identity crisis right now and should seriously consider changing several things in terms of look and feel to avoid being branded as a Mac OS X rip-off, or worse, get sued by Apple." Auza also summarized Ubuntu user feedback: "I believe the fans are divided right now. Some have learned to love the brown color scheme since it uniquely represents Ubuntu, while others wanted change." The first point release, 10.04.1, was made available on 17 August 2010, and the second update, 10.04.2, was released on 17 February 2011. The third update, 10.04.3, was released on 21 July 2011, and the fourth and final update, 10.04.4, was released on 16 February 2012. Canonical provided support for the desktop version of Ubuntu 10.04 until 9 May 2013 and for the server version until 30 April 2015.
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), released on 29 October 2009, was Canonical's 11th release of Ubuntu. It was supported until April 2011. In an announcement to the community on 20 February 2009, Mark Shuttleworth explained that 9.10 would focus on improvements in cloud computing on the server using Eucalyptus, saying "... a Koala's favourite leaf is Eucalyptus", as well as further improvements in boot speed and development of the Netbook Remix. The initial announcement of version 9.10 indicated that this release might include a new theme, but the project was delayed to version 10.04, and only minor revisions were made to the default theme. Other graphical improvements included a new set of boot up and shutdown splash screens, a new login screen that transitions seamlessly into the desktop and greatly improved performance on Intel graphics chip-sets. In June 2009, Canonical created the One Hundred Paper Cuts project, focusing developers to fix minor usability issues. A "paper cut" was defined as, "a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter on his/her first day of using a brand new installation of the latest version of Ubuntu Desktop Edition." The desktop installation of Ubuntu 9.10 replaced Pidgin with Empathy Instant Messenger as its default instant messaging client. The default filesystem is ext4, and the Ubuntu One client, which interfaces with Canonical's new online storage system, is installed by default. It introduced Grub 2 beta as default bootloader. It also debuted a new application called the Ubuntu Software Center that unifies package management. Canonical stated their intention for this application to replace Add/Remove Programs (gnome-app-install) in 9.10 and possibly Synaptic, Software Sources, Gdebi and Update Manager in Ubuntu 10.04. Karmic Koala also includes a slideshow during the installation process (through ubiquity-slideshow) that highlights applications and features in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), released on 23 April 2009, was Canonical's tenth release of Ubuntu. Support ended on 23 October 2010. New features included faster boot time and integration of web services and applications into the desktop interface. Because of that, they named it after the mythical jackalope. It was the first release named after a mythical animal, the second being Utopic Unicorn. It had a new usplash screen, a new login screen and also support for both Wacom (hotplugging) and netbooks. It also included a new notification system, Notify OSD, and themes. It marked the first time that all of Ubuntu's core development moved to the GNU Bazaar distributed version control system. Ubuntu 9.04 was the first version to support the ARM architecture with native support for ARMv5EL and ARMv6EL-VFP.
Named for the wind up binoculars in the Toy Story movies. One architecture was added in this release: ARM EABI (or armel), providing support for newer ARM processors and deprecating the old ARM port (arm). The m68k port was not included in this release, although it was still provided in the unstable distribution. This release did not feature the FreeBSD port, although much work on the port had been done to make it qualify it did not meet yet the qualification requirements for this release.
Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), released on 30 October 2008, was Canonical's ninth release of Ubuntu. Support ended on 30 April 2010. Ubuntu 8.10 introduced several new features including improvements to mobile computing and desktop scalability, increased flexibility for Internet connectivity, an Ubuntu Live USB creator and a guest account, which allowed others to use a computer allowing very limited user rights (e.g. accessing the Internet, using software and checking e-mail). The guest account had its own home folder and nothing done on it was stored permanently on the computer's hard disk. Intrepid Ibex also included an encrypted private directory for users, the inclusion of Dynamic Kernel Module Support, a tool that allows kernel drivers to be automatically rebuilt when new kernels are released, and support for creating USB flash drive images.
Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), released on 24 April 2008, was Canonical's eighth release of Ubuntu and the second long-term support release. Ubuntu 8.04's support ended on 12 May 2011 for desktops and ended on 9 May 2013 for servers as well. Ubuntu 8.04 included several new features, among them Tracker desktop search integration, Brasero disk burner, Transmission BitTorrent client, Vinagre VNC client, system sound through PulseAudio, and Active Directory authentication and login using Likewise Open. In addition Ubuntu 8.04 included updates for better Tango compliance, various Compiz usability improvements, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse cursor when running on a VMware virtual machine, and an easier method to remove Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.04 was the first version of Ubuntu to include the Wubi installer on the Live CD that allows Ubuntu to be installed as a single file on a Windows hard drive without the need to repartition the disk. The first version of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix was also introduced.
Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), released on 18 October 2007, was Canonical's seventh release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 7.10's support ended on 18 April 2009. Ubuntu 7.10 included several new features, among them AppArmor security framework, fast desktop search, a Firefox plug-in manager (Ubufox), a graphical configuration tool for X.Org, full NTFS support (read/write) via NTFS-3G, and a revamped printing system with PDF printing by default. Compiz Fusion was enabled as default in Ubuntu 7.10 and Fast user switching was added.