So, you like the idea of deploying an Ubuntu desktop to all or some of your users. You like the way Ubuntu’s light-client model can give  your older desktop machines a new lease of life. You like the fact that Ubuntu is secure, portable, and easy to manage. Best of all, you like that it costs nothing to license, and comes with a host of enterprise-grade apps that cost nothing to license either.

Now it’s time to see how it works for you in the real world. To help you plan your migration, we’ve compiled our five golden rules for success. These are things we’ve learned from the hundreds of Ubuntu desktop migrations we’ve conducted for clients around the world – from the French National Police Force to the Supreme Court of India.

Download today and discover how to:

• Plan effectively for maximum effect
• Target the users ripe for migration
• Identify the apps that save you money and hassle
• Create the right management flows
• Pilot your project to get it just right

The Ubuntu Developer Summit – UDS – is a major event in the Canonical calendar. Taking place every six months, it is the Ubuntu event which defines the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. In the first week of November, over 800 people, from Canonical engineers and employees, Ubuntu community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and many more gathered to discuss and plan for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin.

UDS covered 420 sessions, under nine tacks, from desktop to design, community to server and cloud. Attendees worked in the usual collaborative and open environment and spent the week pooling their experience and expertise and sharing best practise resulting, as always, in the very best ideas. Right now, those ideas are are represented in hundreds of blueprint documents and are being put into action by developers, community and Canonical, who are already driving forward for April’s launch. As a practical demonstration of that openness you can track our progress here (note, it’s early days!): http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/.

Focus on desktop and the cloud

Over the coming months, we’ll see much more of the fruits of UDS’ labour as new features are developed and collaborations and partnerships formed. Right now, the focus is on refinement, quality and stabilisation. As Ubuntu 12.04 will be a LTS release, which, for the first time, will be supported for five years, getting performance and stability right will be extremely important. For businesses, cloud is becoming ever more important, so we’ll be looking at building out a robust test infrastructure; there will be continued support for the latest releases of OpenStack and much effort will be put into improving Juju and developing the Charms collection.

For our desktop users, refinement of the interface is a continued focus and we’ll regularly run usability testing to make sure Ubuntu looks and feels great. For ubuntu 12.04, there will be a lot of developments for power users, including multi-monitor support, and improvements to boot speed, text-free boot and power consumption. And of course, the community centres around the developer programme, design, governance and loco teams. Engaging and embracing developers continues to be important (for free software) as we seek to bring new and exciting applications to the Ubuntu platform.

Our wonderful sponsors

We also wanted to take this opportunity to extend a special thank you to all of our sponsors who helped us accomplish this monumental task. Cloud Foundry, Rackspace, Google, System 76, Freescale, Nebula, as well as our media partners, Ubuntu User, Linux Pro Magazine, all attended and contributed to the success of UDS in different ways. Some gave plenary sessions;
Brian Thomason and Juan Negron – Cloudfoundry Server deployments using Juju
James Blair and Monty Taylor – Rackspace – Distributed QA in the OpenStack Project

It’s Linaro’s summit too

Also, for the second time, UDS was co-hosted with the Linaro Connect event, where the best software developers met to plan out and code the future of Linux on ARM. Canonical has been actively participating in the Linaro project since it began in 2010, and having both events run in parallel is a good opportunity to share new ideas and collaborate. ARM continues to gain more traction in traditional PC areas, such as the data center and Ubuntu continues to contribute to the enablement of ARM. You can hear more from David Brash’s Linaro plenary, An ARM Technology Update.

And a vision for what’s next

While the focus for Canonical and the Ubuntu community is firmly on the next launch , we’ve already started to think beyond this release. In Mark’s opening keynote, he talked of extending the Ubuntu mission; “‘Linux for Human Beings’ cannot end at the desktop, but needs to take into account the devices that will be used by human beings in the years to come….”. In the coming two years, we’ll start to see Ubuntu powering tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud. You can read more on Mark’s vision for the future of Ubuntu on his blog: or see the full keynote.

For lots more video and insight you can check out the excellent Ubuntu Developers Channel on YouTube

So, roll on Ubuntu 12.04!

As of this week, Ubuntu is now on sale in over 100 retail outlets in Portugal.

Preloaded on the new ASUS Eee PC 1215P, Ubuntu is available to buy in over 100 Vobis and Worten stores (part of the Sonae group) across the country http://www.worten.pt/ProductDetail.aspx?pid=04826099&oid=30|31|36905&c=2655842.

The Eee PC has a slim, lightweight, design and up to 9 hours’ battery life making it suitable for work, play or study.

This is another great piece of marketing activity for Canonical, through launching the Ubuntu computing experience into a brand new retail market.

This year’s Ubuntu Hardware Summit (UHS) will take place on December 8th at the Grand Victoria Hotel in Taipei. You can register your place at www.ubuntu.com.uhs

Building on the success of 2010 (with over 200 attendees), the 2011 Ubuntu Hardware Summit promises to deliver more. With keynote speeches from various members of the Canonical team and a more focused technical delivery, UHS is created especially for product managers and engineers at ODMs and OEMs, with interest or responsibility in deploying Ubuntu on new computers and devices.

Highlights will include presentations on Ubuntu Server, deploying Ubuntu Cloud, QA, power management, hardware enablement….and much more! Details of the event can also be found on the new Ubuntu Hardware Debugging website at http://odm.ubuntu.com/portal/

UHS is sponsored by Canonical and free of charge.

To reserve your space, visit www.ubuntu.com/uhs today as registrations will close on 29th November 2011.

Today HP announced Project Moonshot  - a programme to accelerate the use of low power processors in the data centre.

The three elements of the announcement are the launch of Redstone – a development platform that harnesses low-power processors (both ARM & x86),  the opening of the HP Discovery lab in Houston and the Pathfinder partnership programme.

Canonical is delighted to be involved in all three elements of HP’s Moonshot programme to reduce both power and complexity in data centres.

The HP Redstone platform unveiled in Palo Alto showcases HP’s thinking around highly federated environments and Calxeda’s EnergyCore ARM processors. The Calxeda system on chip (SoC) design is powered by Calxeda’s own ARM based processor and combines mobile phone like power consumption with the attributes required to run a tangible proportion of hyperscale data centre workloads.

The promise of server grade SoC’s running at less than 5W and achieving per rack density of 2800+ nodes is impressive, but what about the software stacks that are used to run the web and analyse big data – when will they be ready for this new architecture?

Ubuntu Server is increasingly the operating system of choice for web, big data and cloud infrastructure workloads. Films like Avatar are rendered on Ubuntu, Hadoop is run on it and companies like Rackspace and HP are using Ubuntu Server as the foundation of their public cloud offerings.

The good news is that Canonical has been working with ARM and Calexda for several years now and we released the first version of Ubuntu Server ported for ARM Cortex A9 class  processors last month.

The Ubuntu 11.10 release (download) is an functioning port and over the next six months and we will be working hard to benchmark and optimize Ubuntu Server and the workloads that our users prioritize on ARM.  This work, by us and by upstream open source projects is going to be accelerated by today’s announcement and access to hardware in the HP Discovery lab.

As HP stated today, this is beginning of a journey to re-inventing a power efficient and less complex data center. We look forward to working with HP and Calxeda on that journey.