The development of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system is starting to take off slowly at the Canonical's headquarters, and today we have some excellent news for our Ubuntu readers.

We've been monitoring the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle for quite some time now to see what Linux kernel version the upcoming GNU/Linux operating system will be based on, and for now, it remains powered by the same kernel packages as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Also, it looks like Ubuntu 16.10 has been switched to a universal local DNS resolver service.

However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team published the other day a new installation of their weekly newsletter, informing the community that Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) would soon be rebased on the latest stable Linux 4.6 kernels. Then, it will move to the Release Candidate builds of Linux kernel 4.7, and after that, the operating system will finally be switched to Linux kernel 4.8.

"Our Yakkety kernel tree still remains a snapshot of our Xenial kernel. We are however tracking a v4.6 based kernel in our unstable repository and hope to get that uploaded to the archive for preliminary testing soon. We'll then start rebasing to the early v4.7-rc#'s. Also, as noted in previous newsletters, we are also going to target a v4.8 based kernel for the 16.10 release," said the Ubuntu kernel developers.

Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) launches on October 20, 2016

Linux 4.8 might also be the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel release, but that's only a guess based on the fact that the latest and most advanced LTS version is Linux kernel 4.4, which is being used in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). The development of Linux kernel 4.8 will start sometime this summer, one week after the release of Linux kernel 4.7 on either July 17 or July 24.

After seven or eight Release Candidate milestones, the final release of Linux kernel 4.8 should hit the streets at the end of September, and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) will be officially launched on October 20, 2016. We will keep you informed of the development progress of Ubuntu 16.10 as soon as we know more. In the coming days, the Linux kernel 4.6 packages should land in the repos.