Can't wait a week to get your hands on Karmic Koala? Canonical on Thursday issued the release candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10.

Unlike earlier builds targeting hardened testers, the Ubuntu team want as many users as possible to try out the penultimate push of 9.10 before the general release set for Thursday, October 29.

"We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user," Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek wrote in a mailing list announcement. He added that there are a still small number of known bugs in the RC that will be fixed before final release, which are listed here.

Ubuntu 9.10 comes default with Ubuntu One, an online storage and file-sharing service with a free-of-charge 2GB of storage that's upgradable to 50GB for $10 per month.

The new version also uses the new version 2.6.31 of the Linux Kernel, boasts faster boot times, and sports the Ext4 filesystem by default which supports larger volume sized and more subdirectories than Ext3. We took a closer look at Karmic Koala's new features and performance gains based on an earlier beta build earlier of this month. Check it out.

Folks interested can download Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate images now from Ubuntu's website. ®

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