Ubuntu Technical Board member and Installer Team Leader Colin Watson has announced that official versions of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" will be available as hybrid ISOs, allowing users to copy them directly to a USB device without the need for an external utility. Starting with the 16 June daily builds, all of the amd64 and i386 CD images on cdimage.ubuntu.com will be available as hybrid images.

In a post on the Ubuntu Developer mailing list, Watson says that users can still use a usb-creator tool, such as the Ubuntu Live USB creator, if they need to enable persistent storage on a USB flash drive, "but if all you need is to install from the stick then this simplifies the process." However, the developer notes that the feature comes with a "small size cost" as extra information is required to support it, pointing out that, on the desktop CD, about 1 MB of extra space is required – on the CD versions, every MB is valuable. A number of other distributions, such as openSUSE and Fedora, have already had hybrid ISOs for some time now.

The latest stable release is Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal, while the current Long Term Support (LTS) version is Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS "Lucid Lynx". The final version of Ubuntu 11.10 is scheduled to arrive on 24 October. Ubuntu is sponsored by UK based Canonical Ltd.

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(crve)