Colin Watson provides the following in the email to the Ubuntu Developers List:

“On a western hillside, a pack of hungry coyotes flushed their prey from a thicket of scrub mesquite. With gleeful yips, they began pursuing what first appeared to be a large jack rabbit. But what was this thing? In between its long ears, the animal was sporting a set of small antlers similar to those of an antelope. Darting first to the left, and then to the right, it reached the bottom of the hill where it put on a burst of speed and quickly outran the trailing coyotes. Once at a safe distance, the creature stopped, turned around and emitted several coyote-like yips in a rude mockery of its hapless pursuers. The sounds seemed to linger tauntingly upon the air as the discouraged pack abandoned the chase. From this small episode, the artful and elusive jackalope emerged from the shadows of an Old West legend.”
– “Song of the Jackalope”, Roy Campbell

The soon to be Ubuntu 9.04 took its first step today with the first of six alpha releases. Outside of a re-merge with changes from Debian, there’s not much difference between Jaunty and Intrepid, yet. There’s also been some focus on building for the ARM architecture, in which Canonical announced its future development of on November 13, but an installable image won’t be available until a future alpha release.

Since this a pre-release, it should not be used in any situation where stability is required as bugs, instability, and frequent breakage are expected. If you’re interested in developing, testing, reporting and fixing bugs, you can find the download pages for the various alphas at the following locations.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/jaunty/alpha-1/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/jaunty/alpha-1/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/jaunty/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu Studio)

Only the alternate and server images are available as the desktop image hasn’t been finished, yet. Some images, like the Kubuntu flavor, are larger than a CD requiring the use of a DVD or virtual machine. A desktop CD should be available in Alpha 2. The release schedule shows the following dates for the upcoming milestones.

  • Alpha 2 – December 18, 2008
  • Alpha 3 – January 15, 2009
  • Alpha 4 – February 5, 2009
  • Alpha 5 – February 26, 2009
  • Alpha 6 – March 12, 2009
  • Beta – March 26, 2009
  • RC – April 16, 2009
  • Final – April 23, 2009

Personally, I took the Alpha 1 ISO, burned it and installed it on my spare Thinkpad T41. While there’s been available updates already, it’s still stable enough for me to write this all out while using it.

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