Ubuntu Release Code Names

Ubuntu is known for having the funkiest release code names around. From time to time users suggest potential names, so if you have a magical idea, please add it to the table at the bottom of this page.

Release Naming Scheme

The official name of an Ubuntu release is "Ubuntu X.YY" with X representing the year (minus 2000) and YY representing the month of eventual release within in that year. Ubuntu's first release, made in 2004 October (10th month) was Ubuntu 4.10. Since the actual release date is not known until it's ready and humans tend to prefer names rather than numbers, a set of codenames are used by developers and testers during the buildup to a release:

Adjective	Animal	Version	Description
Warty	Warthog	4.10	The first "hog"
Hoary	Hedgehog	5.04	Meaning "covered with hair", or "mature/old/wise"
Breezy	Badger	5.10	was going to be "Bendy Badger"...
Dapper	Drake	6.06	Polished, with 5 years of support!
Edgy	Eft	6.10	Fire up the crackpipes! (?!)
Feisty	Fawn	7.04	Courage and restlessness
Gutsy	Gibbon	7.10	Go Ape!
Hardy	Heron	8.04	Hardy Heron with 5 years of support! Most people wanted Happy/Hungry Hippo
Intrepid	Ibex	8.10	due October 2008
Grumpy	Groundhog	latest	Not a release, but a collection of the latest CVS builds. Exists only in peoples mind (and as a spec)

The development codename of a release takes the form "Adjective Animal". So for example: Warty Warthog (Ubuntu 4.10), Hoary Hedgehog (Ubuntu 5.04), Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10), are the first three releases of Ubuntu. In general, people refer to the release using the adjective, like "warty" or "breezy". The names live on in one hidden location---the archive release name in /etc/apt/sources.list and seen on the download mirror network.

History

MarkShuttleworth said the following with regard to where the naming scheme originally came from:

• So, what's with the "Funky Fairy" naming system?

  Many sensible people have wondered why we chose this naming scheme. It came about as a joke on a ferry between Circular Quay and somewhere else, in Sydney, Australia:

  • lifeless: how long before we make a first release?
    sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max.
    lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish.
    sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release.

  And voila, the name stuck. The first mailing list for the Ubuntu team was called "warthogs", and we used to hang out on #warthogs on irc.freenode.net. For subsequent releases we wanted to stick with the "hog" names, so we had Hoary Hedgehog, and Grumpy Groundhog. But "Grumpy" just didn't sound right, for a release that was looking really good, and had fantastic community participation. So we looked around and came up with "Breezy Badger". We will still use "Grumpy Groundhog", but those plans are still a surprise to be announced...

  For those of you who think the chosen names could be improved, you might be relieved to know that the "Breezy Badger" was originally going to be the "Bendy Badger" (I still think that rocked). There were others...

  For all of our sanity we are going to try to keep these names alphabetical after Breezy. We might skip a few letters, and we'll have to wrap eventually. But the naming convention is here for a while longer, at least. The possibilities are endless. Gregarious Gnu? Antsy Aardvark? Phlegmatic Pheasant? You send 'em, we'll consider 'em.

this article was taken from : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames