The Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) was uploaded a few minutes ago on the official mirrors. The developers improved the boot process even further and now Ubuntu 9.04 Beta (with the EXT4 filesystem) will boot in under 20 seconds on a high-end machine! Also, the boot splash was changed, the login screen was redesigned, there are two new wallpapers, three new desktop themes... and you can see them all again in the screenshots below! The brand new GNOME 2.26.0 desktop environment is also present in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. The developers included a technology preview of Eucalyptus in the Server Edition of Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. Eucalyptus will allow users to deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)-compatible clouds. The new "dovecot-postfix" package offers an easy-to-deploy Mail Server Stack that supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP with SASL and TLS.



Last but not least, the following applications were updated in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta: OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, Compiz 0.8.2, Pidgin 2.5.6, The GIMP 2.6.6, Transmission 1.51, Mozilla Firefox 3.0.7, F-Spot 0.5.0.3, Rhythmbox 0.12.0. The kernel packages have also been updated to version 2.6.28-11.37, based on Linux kernel 2.6.28.8.

