Canonical Blog

Next week (31 August through 3 September) VMorld 2009 kicks off in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. For the second year, Canonical has a booth to demonstrate Ubuntu’s virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.

Last year VMWorld 2008 was in sunny Las Vegas. We talked to thousands of people throughout the show, and only found a handful who hadn’t used Ubuntu – don’t worry we sent every one away with a free CD so they could put that right! It was a great show with lots of interest in Ubuntu following on from the 8.04 LTS release, and our virtualization solution.

We expect the 2009 show to be just as much fun. Ubuntu has been on the top of the VMWare charts as a base OS for many virtual machine images, so we hope that the new virtualization features coming in 9.10 will be well received. In 9.04 we previewed Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) our private or on-premises cloud. This gives anyone who has their own servers the ability to set-up a cloud similar to Amazon’s EC2.

We’ll be presenting a talk for enterprises on how cloud computing can help them at the Solution Exchange Theatre on Wednesday 2nd September at 11:50 am. Entitled “The Clear Path to a Cloudy Enterprise”, it will be given by John Pugh, one of Canonical’s Partner Managers. If you would like to hear about the future of cloud computing, how open source offers a real alternative, and how Ubuntu can be used in this scenario then this talk should be informative and fun.

If you are going to be at VMWorld then please come along to the Canonical booth (#2403) and say hello to us. We would love to talk to you about Ubuntu, how you’re using it, and how you can get more from it – see you
in San Francisco!

Today we are announcing the Landscape Dedicated Server Edition — a stand alone version of Landscape that users can install on-site giving them complete control of their Ubuntu environment. This is one of our most requested features so we modified the Hosted version of landscape, keeping all the management, auditing and monitoring features, packaging it as a software appliance you install on your systems. Now Landscape can operate locally so all your information transfers over your local network and all system configuration, policies and profiles are stored on your infrastructure.

New features available with the Dedicated Server and Hosted edition in the October release include:

• Manage your Cloud and physical systems in one console – including server, desktop and Amazon EC2 Cloud instances.

• Scheduled package updates – Now you can schedule package updates and machine restarts for maintenance windows or when network usage is low minimizing the impact to your users.

• Administrator Delegation – Group your systems to meet your needs then assign permissions to different administrators enforcing work rules and enhancing security.

To be the first to know about availability of the Landscape Server, get informed about upcoming Webinars and download the brochure.

Of course we will continue to offer the Hosted version of Landscape along side the Dedicated Server giving users a choice in how they want to manage their Ubuntu systems. All the new features mentioned above are planned to be available in October when we release the next major update of Landscape and Ubuntu Karmic Koala. The Landscape Dedicated Server is available for order now, but installation will not be available until late September / early October.

Click for detailed information on Landscape, Support and our Training products and services.

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the size and reach of the Ubuntu community while netbooks have brought many new consumer users to Ubuntu.  Other advances in user interface design, device compatibility and availability have meant that more small businesses and individuals have been able to start using Ubuntu.

To meet this changing profile,  we’ve launched some new Desktop Services today geared towards this range of users, whether at home or in small businesses. If you’re a new non-technical Ubuntu enthusiast, or an experienced office professional these services are intended to give you the assistance you need to use Ubuntu with confidence.

The way we see it, desktop support shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all, so there are three options to choose from:

The Starter Desktop Service is intended to address the needs of the new Ubuntu user who mainly uses their computer to surf the Web, watch movies, listen to music and write e-mails.

The Advanced Desktop Service is for more experienced users, who use their computer for a broad range of activities. This service helps users migrate their desktop from their previous environment, such as Windows. It also provides help with advanced applications, for example desktop publishing or setting up advanced file systems.

Finally, the Professional Desktop Service is for people who use Ubuntu in their work environment. This service includes assistance with desktop virtualization, advanced productivity applications and integration into the corporate network.

We hope that these new services will enable even more people to use, explore and enjoy Ubuntu.

Steve George – Corporate Services

I’m very happy to announce that today we open-sourced Launchpad. This is the fulfilment of a commitment made a year ago, as well as an experiment in involving the community in the development of a hosted service.

Launchpad has long provided the Ubuntu operating system with an edge up on the competition, giving Ubuntu developers a unified platform for tracking code changes and bug reports in upstream software projects, and giving them convenient ways to package those upstreams for inclusion in Ubuntu. Now Launchpad itself is part of that same ecosystem.

But this is more than just a release of code. Launchpad’s strength is in cross-developer and cross-project communication, including communication even with projects hosted elsewhere (see the code imports and multi-project bugs features). On top of that, Launchpad has rich APIs — you don’t have to talk to Launchpad only through its web user interface, you can write programs to talk to it too. The combination of these two things means that opening up Launchpad gives the free software world the beginnings of an open, programmatic interface to its own infrastructure. I’m very curious to see what a software-savvy user community can do with that.

Going open source also positions Launchpad to be extremely responsive as a hosted platform. New Launchpad features already deploy quickly via the continuous beta-testing system, and a new version of Launchpad is rolled out every month. This regular release schedule ensures that new features reach users while still fresh in the developers’ minds, so that feedback is as effective as possible. Open sourcing Launchpad makes that rapid feedback cycle even more effective: now users can send in changes to the code itself, knowing that what they’re working with is very close to what’s running on the site.

Canonical will continue to run the Launchpad servers, taking care of production and deployment issues; opening up the code doesn’t mean burdening the users with all of that stuff. At the same time, we’ll institute processes to shepherd community-contributed code into the system, so that people who have ideas for how to improve Launchpad can quickly turn these ideas into reality. That’s going to involve some give-and-take — no development community ever has 100% agreement on what direction the codebase should go in, and in this case we have the added complication of running the hosted service at the same time. But I think that’ll work out organically. By this point, Launchpad has a pretty clear identity: it’s the platform that emphasizes cross-project and cross-developer information sharing — a social network with a purpose. We’re looking for improvements that increase the ease with which information (code, bug reports, design documents, etc.) moves between people and projects, and that’s probably what Launchpad’s users are looking for as well.

If you want to join that community, find us in the #launchpad-dev IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, or visit dev.launchpad.net. See you there!

Karl Fogel

With numerous new government backed Open Source initiatives kicking off in The Netherlands, we’ve decided to lead the way and ensure that Ubuntu training is widely available. Having training locations in every major Dutch city, AT Computing and Ictivity Training will provide authorised Ubuntu training from this summer. The first Ubuntu Certified Professional class is scheduled to commence in July; for additional dates or inquiries about closed sessions, the following 3 addresses are your key: www.ubuntu.com/training; www.atcomputing.nl.; http://www.ictivitytraining.nl/.

UK based Skills Matter will also offer Ubuntu courses from July 2009. With a strong grass roots community and an industry-wide reputation for bringing the latest in open source technology courses to its customers, Ubuntu has all the ingredients to be the next success story. More about the company and available courses can be found here: www.skillsmatter.com

Instructors from all partners will be attending the Canonical run Train The Trainer event at the end of June.

Computex starts on June 2 in Taipei and, as every year, sees the world’s PC industry come together to discuss the development of the next generation of notebooks, netbooks and soon-to-be-released products. Canonical has been attending for the last three years and now, if the announcements are any indication, is very much at the centre of things.

We will be demonstrating the Moblin v2 version of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), which is based on the current beta code from Intel. We are also announcing our intention to develop a version based on the full release of Moblin v2, which we expect will be available very shortly.

Screen grab of Ubuntu Moblin Remix (beta technology; not released)

The Intel collaboration does not stop there. We are also announcing the availability of UNR, tuned specifically for the new Intel classmate PC. The new classmate PCs feature swivel-screens that can be laid flat like tablets. They also support touch and automatically adjust for portrait and landscape depending on how the child orientates the PC. UNR supports all these features and is available as a pre-install option immediately, by contract with Canonical.

Our work with Intel is reasonably well-known so it is an encouraging sign of growth to be included in a number of other announcements from major players in the industry. We will announce the results of collaborative work with SanDisk on its new solid state drives. Our engineering teams have worked to optimise the Ubuntu experience on these drives, which are a key component in the netbook space and increasingly the notebook space too. The seek times we have seen are very impressive compared with the most common hard disk drives found on most notebooks today.

Real Networks is announcing the availability of its Real Player for Mobile Devices for Ubuntu. This media player and codec pack is available to original equipment manufacturers planning to ship Ubuntu on any machine type. A marquee name media player shows the progress Ubuntu has made towards becoming a mainstream choice. There are no plans currently to make this available for consumer purchase.

So, Computex is going to be fun. Our Taiwanese office (based in the rather-tall Taipei 101 building)  continues to grow as do our activities on the island and, indeed, in the People’s Republic of China. It’s going to be a busy show but one that I think will see more progress towards Ubuntu becoming the open platform of choice for industry and consumers alike.

Gerry Carr -  Head of Platform Marketing

Announcing the release of Landscape 1.3 – the next version of Canonical’s management and monitoring software that lets you manage multiple Ubuntu systems as easily as one. In addition, Landscape enables you to monitor all your systems from a single Web interface reducing the complexity of managing multiple systems. The theme of 1.3 is Cloud and scalability.

Cloud Computing: EC2 Support
Landscape 1.3 introduces support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud service. Users can now start, stop and manage their Ubuntu instances on Amazon EC2 from within Landscape.  Just enter your EC2 credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage one of our pre-configured versions of Ubuntu that include the Landscape Client.  We have both 32 and 64 bit server versions available in both the US and EU regions. Once you started, you can use Landscape to manage and monitor them as you would your physical systems. Landscape saves you time by allowing you to manage your physical, virtualized and Amazon EC2 instances from one page.

New Custom Graphs
Users can now create and store trends of key system parameters allowing them to view and act on issues before they impact system performance. This gives System Administrators the flexibility of writing a script to monitor any machine readable parameter that is important to them such as temperature, memory and disk usage.

Knowledge Base
We’ve taken the experience our support engineers have gained with Landscape and created a library of articles that are now available in our knowledge base. There are hundreds or articles that you can search through that will save you time by allowing to quickly find and learn about common procedures and fixes.

The Landscape 1.3 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.04 server edition (Jaunty Jackalope). Read more at the Landscape blog or get product details here

Ken Drachnik – Landscape

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has recently (April 1^st) updated its LPIC1 objectives significantly to come in line with advancements made over the past four years. This provides Canonical with the opportunity to readdress the Ubuntu Certified Professional (UCP) certification. As such, new UCP certification objectives have been finalised and the two courses, Ubuntu Professional courses 1 and 2, which prepare students to achieve the certification, are being condensed from two five-day courses to one five-day course. The five-day course will focus solely on the Ubuntu elements of the certification and preparation for the Ubuntu 199 exam.

UCP is designed for junior-to-intermediate-level system administrators working in organisations that are about to deploy, or have already deployed, Ubuntu desktops and servers in the office. The condensed (and focused) course will further assist students in quickly acquiring the skills they need to deploy Ubuntu in a corporate environment.

Ubuntu Training Partners will offer classroom-based training for this course from May 2009. An Elearning version of the course will be available from June. If you have been waiting for the right opportunity to get your staff trained on Ubuntu, this is it! For more detailed information about both courses, check out the Ubuntu Training site.

Microsoft, FUD and the netbook market

Brandon Le Blanc from Microsoft posted an interesting post about Netbooks and Linux last week. While we agreed with his comments about customers wanting choice and looking for outstanding hardware options, we disagree with much of his analysis and unsurprisingly the overall ’spin’ of the post.

While FLOSS software has been improving year on year, the launch of the Asus eeePC with Linux in late 2007 sparked a extraordinary chain of events. We saw an increase in the number of models of computers shipping with Linux, the acceleration of the PC industry’s knowledge of how to work in a non-Windows environment and the repeated extension of XP’s shipping life.

The launch of Windows 7 this year will see the beginning of new chapter in the competition to deliver choice and great customer experiences on standard PC hardware. That is the future – it is worth sharing our perspective on what has happened to date.

Customers welcome choice

We all know that customers like choice and we also know that competition is always good for consumers. We are humble enough as an open source project and company to know that not everyone will want to use Ubuntu. However here is an interesting fact – when customers are offered choice on equally well-engineered computers around a third will select Ubuntu over XP.

Ubuntu offers

• a safe, virus free environment without having to run expensive anti-virus software that slows PCs down
• great open source software like Firefox and OpenOffice.org

• an operating system that boots quickly and stays responsive after years of use

Of course there is a significant benefit for users who do not select Ubuntu or another Linux distribution. The price of XP crashed last year due to competition. So even if you bought a netbook last year with XP – feel free to smile when you see an Ubuntu PC. It’s amazing what an open market can achieve.

Return rates on Linux – Separating fact from FUD

The really big news for the industry is that well-engineered Linux netbooks have similar return rates to XP. What makes a real difference to return rates is not whether it’s Linux or not, but the quality of the device’s hardware and the ability to fully partake in web and media experiences, such as:

• Adobe Flash player being pre-installed
• Basic media codecs being pre-installed (these add a few dollars to the cost of a PC)
• Extensive hibernate and resume cycle testing (many OEMS have had to develop and implement new QA processes to work with Linux)

Customers have every right to expect these basics in their netbooks and we recommend them to manufacturers. Even with Ubuntu’s philosophical and technical opposition to proprietary software, we are clear about the importance of these plug-ins to average consumers. Hey, we even recommend the purchasing of Windows Media Audio and Video codecs to OEMs!

The PC industry learning how to ship with Linux / Ubuntu

Not too long ago, not a single PC manufacturer was shipping Ubuntu. As we go into 2009 – we have never had as many manufacturers nor as many devices being prepared to launch as we do now.

Dell, HP, and Toshiba are all shipping Ubuntu. In Taiwan and China, the extraordinary chain of suppliers who make computers at under $500 possible are learning how to work efficiently with high levels of quality assurance on Linux.

People shouldn’t expect every manufacturer in the market to ship with Linux. It takes time and investment to learn how to do well. Slowly but surely those numbers are growing meaning more units with Ubuntu.

Peripheral Support

Brandon proudly boasts to an admittedly impressive level of peripheral support for Microsoft – the clear implication being that Linux does not match it. Ubuntu and most Linux distributions support over 3000 printers over 1000 digital cameras, and over 200 webcams. It also supports them without the need to search for drivers on dubious websites or load drivers from a CD. Just plug and play.

Looking forward

We are tremendously excited about the netbook category, about launching PCs based on the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 – wow they boot fast. We see continued innovation with the launch of products that support multi-touch, continue to extend battery life and integrate 3G connectivity and GPS functionality.

Most of all – we look forward to continuing to deliver great product to customers who value choice. We are not saying that all of the world should or will use Ubuntu, however the suggestion that customers don’t like Linux is the sort of oversimplification that a great data-driven company like Microsoft might want to steer clear of.

Chris Kenyon – Canonical, OEM Services

P.S Continually repeating that we ‘confirmed’ a 4x return over XP when we did nothing of the sort is really not worthy of a great company like Microsoft. If we are going to compete, let’s do it on real facts and actual statements. You’re better than that, Redmond

Following the growing success of Ubuntu Server Edition, and in response to requests from both students and partners, Canonical has now launched an Ubuntu Server-dedicated course, called ‘Deploying Ubuntu in the Enterprise Environment’.

This five-day course is designed for intermediate-to-advanced system administrators working in organisations which are about to deploy, or have already deployed, Ubuntu desktops and servers in the office.

Participants will acquire the skills they need to deploy, configure and maintain Ubuntu Server Edition within an enterprise infrastructure. As well as building skills for new Ubuntu Server deployments, it has been tailored to meet the needs of companies switching from UNIX, Red Hat and other Linux distributions.

Canonical is trialling an online ‘virtual classroom’ version of the course for two weeks from Monday 4 May 2009, with limited seats sold through the Canonical store. The trial is offered at a special price and includes a special guest speaker, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project. We expect it to be very popular, so if you are interested, don’t delay.

Ubuntu Training Partners will offer classroom-based training for this course from June 2009.

Visit the training website for detailed course objectives and more on virtual classroom training.