The next incarnation of the popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu version 9.10 has been christened the ‘Karmic Koala’ (or ‘Koala’). Following their usual 6-month release cycle, Koala is set to be released in October 2009. Some of the more noteworthy changes for Koala are:

Koala Server:

• Koala officially jumps onto the buzzword bandwagon and promises to support cloud computing (Amazon EC2) out of the box.
• Also the server edition will see the default inclusion of ‘EUCALYPTUS’ which can magically add cloud computing capabilities to your server cluster

Koala on the desktop:

• By far the biggest (and most welcome) change is doing away with the drab brown earthy interface that has plagued Ubuntu releases thus far. A big thumbs up for this one. (I just hope the replacement is well worth it). Update: I guess I was mistaken. We won't have to wait until Koala to at least get a revised boot screenand theme, at least if these pixels from Softpedia are to be believed.
• The second change worthy of note is a better graphical boot process (replacement for usplash)

Koala for Netbooks:

• Last but not the least is better performance on netbooks like the Dell Mini and optimization of screen real estate.

Ah well, its back to the Ibex for now. You can read all the witty verbiage about Karmic Koala on the Ubuntu lists.