Canonical's Joseph Salisbury informed the Ubuntu Linux community about the latest news regarding the development of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

We told you that we'd be constantly monitoring the development cycle of Ubuntu 17.04, and today we have some exciting things to tell you all about as the Ubuntu Kernel Team has published this week's newsletter with information about the arrival of the Linux 4.9 kernel packages in the Zesty Zapus repositories.

"We uploaded a newer v4.9 based Zesty kernel to the archive: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/4.9.0-11.12," reads the newsletter. "This has been promoted to the release pocket. Please test and let us know your results. We anticipate we'll eventually converge on a v4.10 based kernel for Zesty."

Mesa 13.0.2 and X.Org Server 1.18.4 are also available in Zesty

That right there comes as terrific news for hardcore Linux gamers, as Linux kernel 4.9 is known to implement support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands / GNC 1.0 family, but only if the kernel option is enabled, of course. Additionally, the latest Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library stack landed as well.

The X.Org Server 1.18.4 display server is also available in Ubuntu 17.04, along with the open-source AMDGPU (xf86-video-amdgpu 1.2.0) and ATI/Radeon (xf86-video-ati/xf86-video-radeon 7.8.0) graphics drivers. We're now waiting for X.Org Server 1.19.0 to arrive so we can finally enjoy better AMD Radeon graphics on Ubuntu.

The good news continues with the fact that from now on the Ubuntu Kernel Team will concentrate all of their efforts on tracking the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel for Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), and we're only one week away from the launch of the first Alpha development release, but only for the opt-in flavors.