On October 27, 2016, Joseph Salisbury from the Ubuntu Kernel Team published yet another newsletter to keep Ubuntu Linux users in the loop with what Canonical is planning for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 operating system.

We've told you that we're closely monitoring the development cycle of the Ubuntu 17.04 operating system, which was dubbed by Mark Shuttleworth himself as "Zesty Zapus," and we reported earlier this week that the OS is open for development and the first daily build ISO images are available for download.

And now, we'd like to inform our Ubuntu Linux users about the fact that the Ubuntu Kernel Team is currently tracking early Release Candidate versions of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel for Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), but for now, they are waiting for more mature RC builds to land before pushing the new kernel to the repositories.

"We are still tracking early v4.9-rc's for Zesty. This work can been found here: https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-kernel/ubuntu/+source/linux/+git/unstable," writes Joseph Salisbury on behalf of the Ubuntu Kernel Team. "We will wait for a few more -rc releases before preparing an upload for Zesty."

Ubuntu 17.04 could ship with Linux kernel 4.10

However, just like it happened during the development cycle of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), early builds were shipped with the Linux kernel version that was being developed at that moment in time, but the final release was powered by a more recent version, which means that Ubuntu 17.04 may very likely ship with Linux kernel 4.10.

Right now it's pretty hard to tell on which Linux kernel version will Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) be based, but we're taking a wild guess here and say that it could be Linux kernel 4.10, which should be officially released sometime in mid-February 2017. Unfortunately, there won't be enough time for it to be rebased on the next Linux kernel version shipping in mid-April 2017.

The final release of the Ubuntu 17.04 operating system should land at the end of April 2017, but a release schedule is yet to be published. Until then, we'll try to keep you guys informed about all the new features and functionalities that Canonical has planned for the Zesty Zapus release.