Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat"

Mark Shuttleworth has named Ubuntu 10.10 after a very fast, highly social, and primarily insectivorous African mammal.

With a Friday blog post, Ubuntu's "benevolent dictator" announced that version 10.10 of the Linux distro will be known as "Maverick Meerkat". According to Shuttleworth, this means that Ubuntu's "Perfect 10", as he calls it, will be very fast and very social - if not insectivorous.

"We’re booting really fast these days, but the final push remains," the spaceman writes. "Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application. We’re Social from the Start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications. Meerkats are family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe and efficient solution for all the family netbooks."

Plus, he says, meerkats are a lot like Ubuntu developers. "They are also clever – meerkats teach one another new skills. And that’s what makes this such a great community." Read more...