There will be a LiveCD for 8.04.1?

yes for both.. (8.04 will come in a cd and 8.04.1 too will come in a CD when its released)

The version number corresponds to the date it was released. Hardy Heron is scheduled to be released in April of 2008 and Gutsy Gibbon was released in October of 2007. So the versioning scheme is y.mm where y is the year and mm is the month (with preceding zero for months before October).

8.04 is a LTS or Long Term Support release meaning that it will continue to provide security fixes for longer than a standard release. A standard release has 18 months of support while an LTS has 36 months of support on the desktop and 60 months of support on the server. This is mostly designed for the enterprise business where they tend to stick with technologies longer than the home user because upgrading all the time is very expensive.

The next upgrade for 8.04 LTS is 8.04.1 Since it's release there will a lot of minor changes and updates to fix security issues and bugs. If you were to install 8.04 today, as soon as you install it, you have to download hundreds of MB of updates which is quite annoying. 8.04.1 is the first update meaning that all of the updates since it's release are put onto the CD so that if someone chooses to install it, they won't have hundreds of MB of updates to download and install right away.

So the support cycle is different and since I mentioned how the version number is based on it's date, that means that 8.04.1 has newer software than 7.10. For example, I believe 8.04 has Firefox 3 where as the newest stable version of Ubuntu has 2.0 . While Gutsy gibbon has an older version of Firefox, the Ubuntu team does whats called "back-porting" where they will fix bugs and security issues in an out of date program by finding the fixes in a more recent version. They do not, however, add new features. So even though Firefox 2 is being updated for security reasons, it does not include new features introduced in Firefox 3. So basically 7.10 has older software but is more stable and well tested while 8.04 is more up to date with the latest software releases and has more features.

Hope that clears your doubts..:)

Bhavani Shankar.

Thanks Bhavani for your very comprehensive explanation.

Just as curiosity, this is the first version I see to have 2 scheduled releases. It didn't happen before. Is this maybe that Hardy is coming with more support for hardware, more features, more new software than other releases? Which consequently will generate more bugs and problems during the first stage than older releases?

Or this is a strategy to test a version in the real world (thousand of users with different hardware) and tune it to get the final stable version to remain a much more stable LTS?

Thanks Bhavani Shankar, that solved my question.