Happy Birthday Ubuntu

With only nine days left until Karmic Koala’s official release, it’s time to take a look into the past. Five years ago, on the 20th of October, 2004, Mark Shuttleworth and the “warm-hearted Warthogs” from the developer team announced the first official Ubuntu release. Version 4.10, code name “Warty Warthog,” was only the first representative in a line of operating systems that were made by human beings for human beings, aiming to let normal people use Linux.

Let’s take a quick look at when each of the Ubuntu versions was released, and what it brought new:

· Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) – Released on the 20th of September, 2004
· Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) – Released on 8th of April, 2005
· Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) – Released on 13th of September, 2005
· Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) – Released on the 1st of June, 2006
· Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) – Released on the 26th of September, 2006
· Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) – Released on the 19th of April, 2007
· Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) – Released on the 18th of September, 2007
· Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) – Released on the 24th of April, 2008
· Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) – Released on the 30th of September, 2008
· Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) – Released on the 23rd of April, 2009
· Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) – Planned for release on the 29th of October, 2009

Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) was something weird for its time. It was common back then for Linux operating systems to ship on anywhere from two to even nine CDs, but Warty only had two: a Live and an Installation CD. Another thing that separated Ubuntu from the other Linux distributions of the time was the ShipIt service that sent Ubuntu CDs to anyone who requested them, free of charge.

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