“Release early, release often,” that’s the Linux motto. To that end, Canonical will release a new version of Ubuntu, version 7.04 or “Feisty Fawn,” as some call it, on April 19th. The new version will feature an automatic debugging tool, much like the reporting tools that Microsoft has used in Windows for years. “We’ve built infrastructure which allows us to detect whenever an application crashes…gather detailed information like a stack trace and ask the user if he’s willing to give it back to us,” Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said. Ubuntu has seen a steady rise in popularity in recent years, despite competition from more seasoned distributions like Red Hat and SUSE Linux and the incorporation of automatic reporting tools like these moves Ubuntu closer to the territory of more widely-used operating systems like Windows. “There are potentially millions of users of an application on Ubuntu, but they don’t have a relationship with us or upstream developers,” Shuttleworth said. “If we can connect those two groups more effectively, it’s good for both of them.”

For more on “Feisty Fawn”:
– see this CNET article