The Ubuntu project has published a release candidate, or final testing version, for the upcoming 9.04 version of its popular Linux distribution.

"We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user," Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek said late Thursday in an e-mail.

When release candidates prove stable, they sometimes end up being final production versions, although Ubuntu 9.04 still has a small number of bugs to be fixed. The software, nicknamed J...