Linux is a joke. Well, that may be a bit harsh, but Ubuntu certainly seems to be all the excuse founder Mark Shuttleworth needs to make one bad pun after another. In a recent e-mail introducing Karmic Koala, the Ubuntu release slated for late 2009, and his plans for cloud computing this is what he had to say

Announced by Mark Shuttleworth, on the 20th of February, Ubuntu 9.10 (codename Karmic Koala) will be released this year on October 29th. Without any further introduction, let's have a look at the release schedule...

Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan.

This week on Linux Monday, let's look at two Ubuntu-based distributions that are designed to make things easy. One's for kids, and one does a little more of the setup work for you.

Changes in Pidgin 2.5.5:

libpurple:
* Fix a crash when removing an account with an unknown protocol id.
* Beta support for SSL connections for AIM and ICQ accounts. To
enable, check the "Use SSL" option from the Advanced tab when
editing your AIM or ICQ account. (Paul Aurich)
* Fix a memory leak in SILC. (Luke Petre)

Ubuntu 9.04 is getting closer and closer to the final release and we thought that it would be nice to give you guys a sneak peek at some of the upcoming features. The new version of Ubuntu will be released in less than two months, on April 23rd, and it will be dubbed Jaunty Jackalope.

If you want some of the 3rd party, non-free softwares like Adobe Acroread, Real Player, Google Earth and Skype etc, you can always grab them on to your Ubuntu desktop by adding Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) repositories into software sources.

If you want to embrace open operating systems, quit the Microsoft monopoly or the Apple cult, Ubuntu is one of the most powerful operating systems based on the popular open source Linux kernel. It can do everything that the costly operating systems, only oh so much more, and for free!