The install screen for Ubuntu 9.10, or Karmic Koala, which comes sniffing at the heels of Apple Snow Leopard and Microsoft Windows 7. That said, there is always a new or recent Ubuntu: the team puts out a new release every six months.

Over a short period of time, three major operating system releases will take place. From Apple, Mac OS X 10.6 (also known as Snow Leopard) will ship on August 28,2009. From Microsoft, Windows 7 has already been released to manufacturers, with general retail availability set for October of this year. Representing Linux, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is also slated for an October 2009 release.

Over the next few months new versions of the major operating systems will be released: Mac OS X v10.6 (Snow Leopard) sometime in September, Windows 7 on 22 October, and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), also in October. Let’s not forget about FreeBSD.

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing.

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2.

The final release of Karmic Koala comes out in a week. Of all the variants of Karmic Koala coming out, Ubuntu is undoubtably the most well know with the largest userbase. In this article, we look at all the official variants of Karmic Koala (including Ubuntu) so that it may help the newbies to see what are the options available.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), due for release in late October this year,The Karmic Koala Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 9.10, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 9.10 is the upcoming version of the Ubuntu operating system. The common name given to this release from the time of its early development was “Karmic Koala”.

The Ubuntu development team unleashed the fourth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, which is scheduled for release in late October this year. In this release, Firefox 3.5 replaced the old Firefox 3.0 as the default web browser! The actual version of Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Alpha 4 is 3.5.2.

Another interesting addition...