As a testament to Ubuntu’s growing mainstream success, Canonical and Dell this week announced that they were working together to offer Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on select desktops and notebooks. The deal was struck in response to an overwhelming number of requests made on the Dell IdeaStorm website for Ubuntu to be bundled with Dell systems.

Mark Shuttleworth said of the deal in a video interview posted on the Dell blog, “It’s very exciting to see this free software community actually expressing itself; and it’s equally exciting to see a very large company listening to that freedom of expression”.

According to Dell, notebooks and desktops preloaded with Ubuntu will be available in the USA in the next few weeks.

Due to some Kubuntu gremlins from Chicago, the stories for the Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu 7.04 releases was slightly delayed. However, this problem has now been dealt with and us such, we are proud to publish, a few hours late, the release announcements for Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu 7.04. You can read more about Ubuntu 7.04 (and see all the new features), Edubuntu 7.04 and Xubuntu 7.04.

Want to celebrate the Feisty release in style, have some fun and possibly win some great prizes as well? Well, you need to read on … this is going to be fun. :)

The competition is open to both individuals and teams.

For individuals:

The task is simple - upload a picture of yourself with a logo from one of the Ubuntu family of distributions that has had a Feisty release.

Be inventive! How about a picture of you in front of a famous landmark? Maybe be in the fancy dress of a well known Ubuntu contributor? Use your imagination - the most interesting pictures win!

In this competition the first prize wins $500USD, signed Feisty CD by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu t-shirt, Ubuntu book and the runner-up wins $250, Ubuntu t-shirt, Ubuntu book so get snapping!

And for groups:

The task is simple - upload a picture of your group recreating one of the logos from the Ubuntu family of distributions that has had a Feisty release.

Be inventive! Why not recreate the Ubuntu logo with a number of people laid on a large playing field? Why not recreate the Kubuntu logo with playing cards? Why not recreate the Edubuntu logo with school books? Use your imagination - the most interesting pictures win!

In this competition the first prize wins $500USD, signed Feisty CD by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu t-shirt, Ubuntu book and the runner-up wins $250, Ubuntu t-shirt, Ubuntu book so get snapping!

Go and see The Funky Feisty Competition website to see how to get involved!

ShipIt, the service that provides free Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu CDs has been a huge hit since it was first announced, and a huge number of CDs for each Ubuntu release has been sent out. Individuals, LoCo Teams, community groups and other people have all ordered CDs, and many a tradeshow and conference has been graced with CDs from ShipIt as well as an accompanying LoCo team to spread the Ubuntu love.

With Ubuntu 7.04, the Feisty Fawn about to be released, ShipIt is primed to send out fresh Feisty CDs for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu.

Like with Edgy, Feisty CDs will be available to Approved LoCo teams in pre-picked packs. These packs will include the following range of platforms:

• 200 Ubuntu PC
• 25 Ubuntu 64bit
• 30 Kubuntu PC
• 15 Kubuntu 64bit
• 30 Edubuntu

The CDs are available on ShipIt - to order Feisty CDs for your LoCo team
see this page.

Ubuntu Feisty translations are now open in Launchpad!

The Launchpad team have imported existing translations both from Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) and directly from upstream projects. You can see how much of each language remains untranslated on the Feisty translations overview page.

During the import, there were some problems converting from OpenOffice.org’s language pack format to the .po format used by Launchpad. Unfortunately, this means that OpenOffice.org isn’t yet available to translate. We’re sorry for the pain this will cause. We have, though, created a workaround to fix the import problem and OpenOffice.org should be ready for translation later this week.

If you have any questions or comments, please join us in #launchpad or on the launchpad-users mailing list.

Matthew and the rest of the Launchpad team.

The latest development milestone release (Herd 5) for the Ubuntu project’s next release, Feisty Fawn, has been released. This release will become Ubuntu 7.04 on April 19th 2007.

Pre-releases of Feisty are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system, or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are however recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs. Installing a milestone and then upgrading through the release cycle should leave you with a close approximation of the final release.

Herd 5 is the fifth (and last one before the beta version) in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Feisty development cycle. The Herd images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing current snapshots of Feisty.

The primary focus during the time from Herd 4 has been bug fixing. Please refer to this link for information on changes in Ubuntu, and this link for changes in Kubuntu.

You can read the complete release announcement which also contains links to the mirrors where you can get Herd 5.

The latest development milestone release (Herd 4) for the Ubuntu project’s next release, Feisty Fawn, has been released. This release will become Ubuntu 7.04 on April 19th 2007.

Pre-releases of Feisty are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system, or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are however recommended for Ubuntu developers and members of the community who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

The primary focus during the time betweeen Herd 3 and Herd 4 has been a mix of feature development and bug fixing. More details about recent changes can found on the Ubuntu and Kubuntu Herd 4 pages.

You can read the complete release announcement which also contains links to the mirrors where you can get Herd 4.

The latest development milestone release (Herd 2) for the Ubuntu project’s next release, Feisty Fawn, has been released. This release will become Ubuntu 7.04 in April 2007.

There have been many improvements along the lines of bug fixes, feature implementations, and the latest versions of the most popular Open Source software currently available. We don’t recommend it for use as a stable environment, but it is great for testing Ubuntu and contributing to the next release by filing bugs!

You can download Herd 2 here:

• Ubuntu
• Kubuntu
• Edubuntu
• Xubuntu

You can also read the the complete release announcement.

Mark, glorious leader of the Ubuntu project, has announced the codename for the next development version of Ubuntu, and explained his plans for the next release. Key features for the next release will be:

improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects.

Mark cites “courage and restlessness” as two of the themes for the spirit of the next 6 months of Ubuntu development, and has declared that the codename will be The Feisty Fawn.

We at the Fridge think this is the best Ubuntu codename so far. Find out more about the Ubuntu codename system and read some users’ suggestions for cool codenames on the DevelopmentCodeNames page on the Ubuntu wiki!