Do they have some special meaning related to the release version or they are just random names to sound cool?

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1 Answer

They don't carry any particular meaning. They came about as a joke between Mark Shuttleworth ( founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu ) and Robert Collins, as suggested on Ubuntu Wiki here:

So, what's with the "Funky Fairy" naming system? Many sensible people have wondered why we chose this naming scheme. It came about as a joke on a ferry between Circular Quay and somewhere else, in Sydney, Australia:

 lifeless: how long before we make a first release? sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max. lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish. sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release. 

And voila, the name stuck. The first mailing list for the Ubuntu team was called "warthogs", and we used to hang out on #warthogs on irc.freenode.net. For subsequent releases we wanted to stick with the "hog" names, so we had Hoary Hedgehog, and Grumpy Groundhog. But "Grumpy" just didn't sound right, for a release that was looking really good, and had fantastic community participation. So we looked around and came up with "Breezy Badger". We will still use "Grumpy Groundhog", but those plans are still a surprise to be announced... For those of you who think the chosen names could be improved, you might be relieved to know that the "Breezy Badger" was originally going to be the "Bendy Badger" (I still think that rocked). There were others... For all of our sanity we are going to try to keep these names alphabetical after Breezy. We might skip a few letters, and we'll have to wrap eventually. But the naming convention is here for a while longer, at least. The possibilities are endless. Gregarious Gnu? Antsy Aardvark? Phlegmatic Pheasant? You send 'em, we'll consider 'em.

NOTE: lifeless is Robert Collins. sabdfl is Mark Shuttleworth.