Last month Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft announced new requirements for manufacturers wanting to ship Windows 8 systems, including a feature called “Secure Boot”.

Canonical, together with Red Hat, today publishes a white paper highlighting the implications of these requirements for users and manufacturers. The paper also provides recommendations on how to implement “Secure Boot”, to ensure that users remain in control of their PCs.

UEFI is a good step forward
How much do you know about the BIOS running on your laptop today? Sure, you probably have frantically pressed F12 at some point to try the latest Ubuntu from a CD or USB stick. Beyond that, BIOS doesn’t often get much attention.  The thing is: BIOS is evolving, and all thanks to the UEFI Specifications.

The UEFI Forum, of which Canonical is a member, is defining the next generation interface between your system’s firmware and any operating system that runs on it. The new specs will make Ubuntu systems boot quicker, have a better battery life and are easier to configure.

The latest UEFI specification also defines a process called Secure Boot (version 2.3.1 – Chapter 27). Secure Boot is designed to address the potential for malware to insert itself between the firmware and the operating system on your computer. It accomplishes this by enforcing that only “approved” software is able to boot in your computer by way of a key that recognises pre-approved and signed software.

According to Microsoft’s presentation at //BUILD/2011, Secure Boot will be “Required for Windows 8 client”. While the UEFI specification does not recommend a specific implementation, Microsoft has a preferred solution (outlined on this blog post) which does not give the user full control over what software that is approved to run on their PC. This is the real issue for users.

Secure Boot should be available to all users
Canonical successfully partners with computer manufacturers to ship millions of  Ubuntu pre-installed systems every year. While this distribution will continue to thrive, we are concerned for users wanting to install any Linux distribution on a PC sold with Secure Boot “ON”.

Any new Windows 8 PC will have Secure Boot switched “ON” when it leaves the shop and will be able to boot Microsoft approved software only. However, you will most likely find that your new PC has no option for you to add your own list of approved software. So to install Linux (or any other operating system), you will need to turn Secure Boot “OFF”.

However, we believe that you have the right to have your cake and eat it too!  Its possible to have Secure Boot and the ability to choose your software platform.

This is why we recommend that systems manufacturers include a mechanism for configuring your own list of approved software. This will allow you to run Windows 8 and Linux at the same time in your PC with Secure Boot “ON”. This should also include you being able to try new software from a USB stick or DVD.

Even with the ability for users to configure Secure Boot, it will become harder for non-techie users to install, or even try, any other operating system besides the one that was loaded on the PC when you bought it. For this reason, we recommend that  PCs include a User Interface to easily enable or disable Secure Boot and allow the user to chose to change their operating system.

Canonical has discussed these concerns with key industry partners and competitors, resulting in the “Secure Boot Impact on Linux” White Paper, authored by Jeremy Kerr (Technical Architect at Canonical), James Bottomley (Kernel Developer) and Matthew Garret (Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat).

I recommend you read this document to gain a better understanding on how Secure Boot will affect you. We will continue to work with our partners to ensure you still get to choose what runs on your PC!

On Wednesday in Beijing, Canonical and Dell announced the start of an exciting retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China.

The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.

For the consumer, Ubuntu is now an easy choice, with a clean, crisp elegant interface, an exceptional browsing experience and a fully-integrated software center for great applications and games (both free and paid for). It also includes leading services such as the Ubuntu music store and the Ubuntu One cloud storage service built-in.

With an actively growing base of over 20 million users this represents another significant endorsement from one of the world’s major PC vendors.

Canonical has grown dramatically over the last several years. This growth is driven by increasing demand for our services and products by end users, businesses and partners, and by investment to deliver our part of the future of free software.  As Ubuntu’s position in the marketplace and as the leading free software platform has matured, we have needed change the way we align our teams internally.  The purpose of these changes is to ensure greater efficiency for us, for the customers we serve and for the partners with whom we go to market.

Historically we have had three business units geared to match the customers and established ecosystems which Canonical, as a start up, needed to penetrate: enterprises who want services in support of Ubuntu deployments (Corporate Services), industry players who want to deploy and distribute Ubuntu on their machines (OEM Services), and end users who want web-based content and services on top of the free platform (Online Services).

However, as the number and size of enterprise deployments and service contracts increases, there are often significant hardware purchases involved and our solid partnerships with most of the OEM industry provide value to the customer.  Similarly, our OEM partners and their corporate sales teams often introduce Ubuntu and Canonical to their customers. And of course at times OEMs are also our corporate customers, as the recent announcement of the HP Cloud based on Ubuntu demonstrates. Given these circumstances, our internal separation of sales and delivery of services to OEM and Corporate users began to make less sense.

Therefore in order to better meet our customers’ and partners’ needs, we have brought together the sales and sales support teams of OEM and Corporate Services into a single Sales and Business Development team led by Chris Kenyon. Chris has been with the company for five years and has led many of our largest sales, as well as guiding our most significant partnerships.

To support our partners and customers, we have created a single Professional and Engineering Services team led by Jon Melamut. Jon has been with the company for four years, working with our largest OEM partners and spending a lot of time in Asia strengthening those relationships. The synergy that can be harnessed through the shared learning and execution within these support and engineering teams will make Canonical more efficient and adroit in resolving the knotty issues our partners and customers face from the desktop to the cloud.

Steve George has added Product Management to his portfolio and now leads our Communications and Product Management teams. This will enable us to define and tell more powerful and compelling stories around our great products.  And we’ve consolidated the Ubuntu Software Center work into our Online Services group under Cristian Parrino’s leadership.  Previously the Software Center was built and operated by a virtual team across the company, but we believe that the consolidated team will be able to respond more effectively to the extraordinary growth and interest in this outlet for application developers has generated.

I’ve highlighted above some of the changes in Canonical, but what hasn’t changed is equally significant.

Mark Shuttleworth continues to lead overall Product Strategy. He has an able team of designers, engineers and project managers who lead Canonical’s investment in improving the state of design in open source as well delivering some of Ubuntu’s groundbreaking work in user experience. Mark’s industry and technical vision, from client to cloud, resonates throughout Canonical.

Elliot Murphy leads our Core DevOps (CDO) team. Some of the real magic of Canonical and Ubuntu takes place behind the scenes in CDO. For example, this team runs our internal cloud. Everyone at Canonical has unlimited access to our cloud for whatever purpose they want – this spawns incredible nuggets of innovation, as well helps us understand issues our own cloud customers will face.  In addition to creating developer tools like Launchpad and Bazaar, the CDO team provides the infrastructure that delivers Ubuntu to millions around the world. In our release last week, that infrastructure withstood overwhelming demand. The Ubuntu website served over 3,000 requests per second, and the Ubuntu repositories fed tens of Gb of bandwidth from Canonical’s data centres, over 200 mirrors around the world and a commercial CDN.

And of course all of the above is built on the rock that is Ubuntu.  Rick Spencer continues to lead the Ubuntu Engineering team. Because the Ubuntu work is done in an open, transparent manner, his team is probably the best known part of Canonical.  They will all be at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (Orlando, 31 Oct – 5 Nov) as we publicly discuss plans for the next Ubuntu release.  There will be sessions on technical requirements, design and implementation plans for Ubuntu on the desktop, server and cloud. As always, your participation and input is welcome.

Finally, Steve Bianchi joined earlier this year to lead our internal operations such as Finance, Legal, People and Culture.  He joined Canonical from Unilever, and brings a strong technical background as well as years of experience in organisational effectiveness.

As an organisation we are prepared for the near- and long-term challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us.  I am confident that Canonical brings real and immediate benefit to those who choose to work with us, and that with these changes we will be even more responsive to their needs, and able to deliver the value of free software and the Ubuntu platform to more individuals, businesses and governments than ever.

I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM now for a couple of days and I have to say: It is great! Ubuntu has had a long history of supporting ARM Systems on a Chip (SoC) since 2008, but Ubuntu 11.10 is a significant milestone.

Introducing.. Ubuntu Server on ARM – Technology Preview

Canonical announced back in August that Ubuntu Server 11.10 would include the first ARM version of the product, and here it is. While this is just the first step on an exciting journey, it is worth to celebrate that the voyage has started. I look forward to see what 12.04 LTS brings us on this space!

Playing with Ubuntu on ARM (Toshiba AC100)

It is hard to really grasp the full experience of Ubuntu on ARM when you are playing with a development board. For this reason, we have released a demo image for the Tegra2-based (Nvidia) Toshiba AC100.

Running Unity 2D, it shows off  that Ubuntu on ARM is a great platform for computing, in a very compact design and with a very long battery life. For all these reasons, this is my system of choice to take to UDS-P.

If you have a Toshiba AC100, I encourage you to install Ubuntu 11.10 on it!

TI OMAP4 Panda Board

Powered by the Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, the Panda Board packs in “a dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, a C64x DSP, and 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM“.  Providing an affordable and competitive design tool for the embedded mobile space.

Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM is available in headless and full image for Panda. You can find download links and installation instructions here. You can also find there Ubuntu 11.10 for OMAP3 (Beagle Board).

Freescale IMX53 QuickStart Board

The IMX53 Family is oriented towards automotive solutions. Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM is the first release of Ubuntu to provide support for the IMX53 QuickStart Board. You can find download links and installation instructions here.

Linaro and Ubuntu

Both the TI OMAP4 and Freescale images are based on the Linaro outputs for those SoCs. This has greatly our capacity to support ARM development boards.

November 16th – 2pm UK time

After years of development and fine tuning, the cloud vision of true computing elasticity is finally a reality. The question now is how organisations can best take advantage of the latest cloud technologies to optimise their IT, scale infrastructure and services in near-real time, and make the most of new market opportunities.

In our webinar, Ubuntu’s Founder Mark Shuttleworth and Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady share their ideas on the cloud and the benefits it offers businesses today. They discuss how open-source technologies in general, and Ubuntu Cloud in particular, can help companies avoid frustrating vendor lock-in and stay in control of their own cloud destinies. They also explore Ubuntu’s unique attributes, looking at how it minimises hardware and software costs, accelerates cloud deployment, and supports dynamic service provisioning and scaling.

Register now: http://www.brighttalk.com/channel/6793

Today our CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack Conference in Boston that HP has chosen Ubuntu as one of the initial lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud. HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes.

We are excited to join with HP in recognizing that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, ISVs and businesses. Both companies share a common commitment to open source and both embrace the OpenStack community. With over 117 member companies the momentum behind OpenStack is truly game changing and promises to position it at the center of the next wave of computing.

This is an important announcement on several fronts – that OpenStack is seen as the platform of choice for building out the largest Public Clouds, and that Ubuntu has what it takes to power OpenStack clouds as a scalable and hardened host OS and responsive and flexible guest OS.

Ubuntu is the reference OS for OpenStack but like in any other open source project we need to earn our keep on a daily basis and having HP select us is a positive reflection of Ubuntu as a Cloud OS.