Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Days before the official release of Edgy Eft, Mark Shuttleworth has recently announced the name of the next development version of the Ubuntu distro family.

“With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting – seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.

In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers.”

Judging by the specifications of next months development meeting, more emphasis seems to be placed on improving assistive technology & accessibility features such as; braille device support, screen magnification, and speech synthesis.

I have a friend, whom I’ve known for over 20 years (since we were knee high to grasshoppers), who will be very appreciative of such features. Hopefully the developers will get it right and liaise with people affected by sensory deprivation and make significant improvements of accessibility, which are surprisingly still very primitive within Linux & Open Source.