In a message to the ubuntu-devel mailing list, the Ubuntu Release Team has announced that there are some slight changes to the release schedule of Ubuntu 11.04. According to the original release schedule, the final release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" on 28th April was to be preceded by a Release Candidate on 21st April.

According to the changes, the Release Candidate has been scrapped and in its place, the Release Team has added a second beta on 14th April. The changes has been necessitated by the fact that 21st April is just before Easter and, so, many developers and testers would be unavailable during the time.

This is what Kate Stewart, wrote:

After discussing this with the key stakeholders and not getting any negative feedback from them or in the weekly release meetings, we're going to go ahead and add a Beta 2 for this release, and drop the Release Candidate from the Natty Schedule.

The date for the final release though remains unaffected. The release schedule of Ubuntu 11.04 as it stands now is as given below:

• Alpha 1 - 2nd December 2010
• Alpha 2 - 3rd February 2011
• Alpha 3 - 3rd March 2011
• Beta 1 -  31st March 2011
• Beta 2 - 14th April 2011
• Final Release - 28th April 2011

[via: The H Online]