Canonical Blog

System 76 were one of the first (the first?) to provide Ubuntu pre-installed on their excellent desktop and laptop machines. Carl Richell and the guys have been cranking them out in Denver Colarado for a couple of years.

Recently though they have certified on server! Here the release. Their jackal machines can now be purchased with our very own Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition right on board. So congratulations to System 76 for passing certification. If you’ve followed that link and think the number of certified servers is a little low, I’d agree with you. But rest assured it won’t be for long. Marc Tardiff and the guys have been working very hard on the Hardware Verification Program which includes most of the world’s big manufacturers. And when they pass we will add their certification to that page. So stay tuned.

Gerry

You might have missed it but Dell has expanded the availability of machines running Ubuntu to Canada and Latin America. New territories seem to be becoming almost commonplace, which is nice.

Lest we forget, consumers can now buy a Dell machine running Ubuntu in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. And on a pretty impressive range of machines.

People ask us all the time ‘how’s the Dell deal going’? I think I’ve read about its demise at least 5 times on various blogs and media since it started almost a year ago. I think these announcements are a pretty eloquent testimony to how it’s going. Now go buy a machine!

Vive la Logiciel Libre!

Today the Gendarmerie Nationale (The French national police force) announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next 3 years. Read an excellent article on it

This comes at the end of a two year migration project where the Gendarmerie Nationale have been using Open Office and Firefox before starting the full migration. This as a great win for everyone in the open source and the Ubuntu community and testament to the high quality, strong security and ease of use of Ubuntu.

More Ubuntu in France
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This announcement, combined with the National Assembly’s migration to Ubuntu in July and Dell shipping Ubuntu in France shows just how vibrant the Ubuntu community is in France. Canonical are delighted to announce that we will be joinging the APRIL (*A*ssociation pour la *P*romotion et la *R*echerche en *I*nformatique *L*ibre) whose work promoting Free Software continues to help users discover the benefits of open source and choice.

P.S. If you are in Paris at Linux Solution today or tomorrow - come by our booth or visit Frederic, Didier and others on the excellent Ubuntu France community booth.

Chris Kenyon - Canonical - Director, Business Development

The Ubuntu Live Call for Participation is open now. Last year we had a fantastic collection of speakers, exhibitors, tutorials, social events and, most importantly, attendees. If you missed the event, you can see videos of the 2007 keynote speakers online. We’ve got our work cut out for us to come up with a set of speakers that meets the standard set by Mitch Kapor, Matt Asay, Mark Shuttleworth, Marten Mickos, and Matt Zimmerman, but we’re up for the challenge. (That All Star “M” team was so impressive that even Jeff Waugh and Eben Moglen were thinking of changing their names!)

I can tell you that the 2008 Ubuntu Live Programme Committee is already planning a great event , bringing together the best of the open source and business communities. I’m really looking forward to it, and to the opportunity to out-surf Jono.

Registration for Ubuntu Live will open in the coming weeks, but right now the best way to get involved is to submit a talk by 4 February.

Jane Silber

Welcome to the Canonical Blog. The goal of the blog is to provide a vehicle for people who work for Canonical to respond to some of the questions we get asked, to explore the issues we care about, and to expand on some of the initiatives in which we are involved. It is a companion piece to the Fridge, Planet Ubuntu and to Mark’s blog but it is different as it is not the voice of the Ubuntu Community.

It is the Canonical (capital C) voice. It is (we hope) the considered opinion of people within Canonical with a valuable perspective on a specific topic. It is here to address that gap where a press release is over the top but we want to respond to an issue or we want to provide more colour on an announcement, where we want to provoke debate or bring attention to something that we feel is important.

We live in interesting times in computing and at Canonical we are fortunate to find ourselves at the centre of a lot of the more interesting developments. We hope this blog develops into a useful perspective on these issues.

- The Canonical Team