With Breezy Badger out the door, the next version of Ubuntu, titled Dapper Drake, went into production today. Top of the high-level goals for Dapper is for it to be a “polished” distribution.

According to a missive sent to the Ubuntu development community today by Mark Shuttleworth, Dapper Drake (version 6.4 of the Ubuntu Linux distributions) aims to be “an extremely polished release, on both the desktop and the server”.

sabdfl has kicked off the development cycle for Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake). A preliminary list of goals has already been started. This upcoming version will feature three years of desktop support and five years of server support, so the development cycle will be probably be different from what has been done in the past. The bulk of this planning and specification work for the release will be done at the Ubuntu Below Zero development conference in Montreal, Canada during the first week of November.

For you trivia buffs, the first upload was by Robert Collins, who pushed in a new version of fl-cow.

The Ubuntu 5.10 release is out, and the initial reviews are good. The Ubuntu team, however, is not taking time out to drink beer and relax before pondering its next release. Well, OK, maybe they are taking a little time. But, when the hangovers wear off, they are still putting some thought into their next release, which will break some new ground. Meanwhile, the Debian Project is looking forward to its next release as well. In both cases, the planning process gives us a hint of what to expect from these distributions in the near future.

The sabdfl calls! Ubuntu users far and wide, please participate in the OSDL Linux Desktop Survey:

This survey will help us understand what features are most important for the next release. We are just starting to set the feature list for Dapper (6.04) and would appreciate your knowledge and ideas.

In addition, if you have specific feature requests, now’s a good time to mail them to me. I’ll be preparing for the Ubuntu Below Zero (UBZ) conference over the next ten days, and ideas that come in before then could make it onto the agenda for the dev team.