Yesterday saw the official release of the latest version of Ubuntu, "Jaunty Jackalope", v 9.04. There are release parties planned around the world, with  London last night and Manchester and Cardiff still to come.

The new version comes with the latest Gnome desktop as standard, bringing with it an all in one disk burner app and improvd support for multiple monitors, which will please those like me who've ever tried presenting from a netbook. There's also a graphcics driver upgrades, a really cool desktop notifications system, a kernel upgrade, better wifi and 3g support and support for the Ext4 file system, which may well become standard for 9.10. Boot time, for some installs, is down to c 25 seconds!

9.04 also sees OpenOffice.org v 3.0 as standard making this a very appealing operating system for netbooks and home PCs, and offering significant savings over proprietary alternatives.Ubuntu 9.04 is very much a mainstream operating system that could appeal to all sorts of users - you certainly don't need to be a geek to run Ubuntu!

Another interesting Ubuntu development, although not news, is a server edition for Amazon's EC2 cloud based service, offering high availability fault resistant computing, admittedly at a price.

Ubuntu's self-appointed benevolent dictator for life, Mark Shuttleworth has promised us a supply of discs for the unconference, but you can download your own copy from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download