Software company Canonical has released version 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” of its Ubuntu Linux operating system with an emphasis on cloud computing services in addition to regular feature enhancements.

The 9.04 release comes six months after 8.10, or "Intrepid Ibex".

Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition includes support for Eucalyptus, an open source application for creating and managing “private clouds” compatible with Amazon's EC2 API.

Included as a technology preview, Eucalyptus can dynamically create virtual machines, configure multiple clusters into a single cloud and deploy an elastic block storage equivalent and an S3 compatible storage manager.

Eucalyptus versions 1.5rc and above will be included with Jaunty, which has support for the KVM hypervisor (in addition to Xen), EBS for storage, an improved Web interface, and improved vm transfer and caching performance.

Ubuntu's inclusion of cloud computing software comes in the first release after Canonical announced a beta program for hosting Ubuntu 8.10 Server on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service late last year.

Jaunty also adds a new turn-key mail server with the integrated dovecot-postfix package which provides a mail server stack with support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP with security.

Other enhacements that will appear with Jaunty include Linux kernel 2.6.28, GNOME 2.26 (Kubuntu 9.04 will have KDE 4.2.2), X.Org 1.6 display server, a new notification system, and the Ext4 filesystem as an option.

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” can be downloaded for free from http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/.