Last night I had the pleasure of popping in to the Ubuntu Jaunty release party in London. The venue, despite being quite large, was utterly packed with people associated with the Ubuntu community either by working on it in some way or just being users. It is amazing to think that this was only one of a hundred release parties taking place worldwide for this latest release of Ubuntu, which has a six monthly release schedule. The excitement is justified, the latest release of Ubuntu, version 9.04 (or to use its development name Jaunty) is faster, slicker and has more cutting edge features than its predecessor, Ubuntu 8.10. The project has lived up to its slogan of “Linux for human beings” by producing an operating system that is simple to run and just works (mostly ;)).