Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix based on Ubuntu 11.10 is now available for corporate and government institutions evaluating Ubuntu as a desktop solution. The combination of Ubuntu’s ease of use, outstanding free software applications, certified commercial apps, and Canonical’s management solution makes for a compelling enterprise desktop scenario that saves time and money while keeping users productive. Just yesterday IT Pro published this independent assessment confirming just that.

In the past year, many businesses have adopted Ubuntu as a desktop. With the approach of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and its five years of support on server and desktop, even more are evaluating the potential benefits of an easily deployed and managed, virus-resistant platform that is widely trusted and available pre-installed from leading PC brands like Dell and Lenovo.

This remix simplifies the process of customising Ubuntu for corporate needs. Most businesses deploying Ubuntu on corporate desktops perform a similar set of tasks; removing consumer-focused applications like games, and installing corporate-focused software such as thin client apps. The Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix is a simple base image with the most common corporate changes pre-configured. It can be deployed into a corporate environment or used as a starting point for further customization.

The Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix contains all the software needed to integrate into your IT infrastructure while removing games, social networking and file sharing applications, development and sysadmin tools, and other software that organizations don’t commonly support. The first release includes VMware View, Adobe Flash Plugin, and OpenJDK 6 Java runtime environment.

If this makes sense for your business you can register to download Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix and start evaluating what Ubuntu and Canonical can do for your organisation.

Canonical and Ubuntu have made their CES debut this week, and already it’s been a
resounding success. Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu One have both been of particular interest to a constant flow of visitors from media to manufacturers, exhibitors and developers.

It is almost the end of day two and there have been over 5,000 visitors to the Ubuntu booth in South Hall 4 (stand 35379). In fact, people have been so impressed, that all the Ubuntu 11.10 CDs and printed Ubuntu TV collateral have run out. We have also given many interviews to the world’s media and have already seen some great coverage, which as many regulars to Ubuntu will appreciate, will help serve to introduce Ubuntu to many new potential users.

Ubuntu rocks!

As John Bernard suggested in a previous post, we have an exciting concept design that we will be showcasing at CES and on the web.  Ubuntu TV is a vision of how TV will work in the future. With no cables, no boxes and no hassles,  the goal is to uncomplicate television for the average viewer while delivering to him or her all the services and options that they are becoming used to.

Ubuntu TV showcased at CES

To give the world a full picture of what we will be demonstrating, we are launching today a dedicated area on the Ubuntu website featuring demos and a world of information on what we have planned in this space. You can see it all now at ubuntu.com/tv

Look out for a series of posts from my colleagues at CES looking at other products we are demonstrating at CES, and the buzz from the showroom floor.

Gerry

Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.

On display will be the latest in Desktop, Cloud and demonstrations on Ubuntu One, plus an exclusive Ubuntu concept design which will be announced during the show.

Find out more by coming to visit us at CES and see why Ubuntu is the primary computing environment on millions of desktops around the world and used by thousands of businesses. You can also discover how Canonical supports a rapidly increasing number of manufacturers pre-installing Ubuntu on their hardware.

To set up a meeting at the show and discuss Ubuntu, now the world’s third largest Desktop Operating System, email sales@canonical.com.

Canonical launched Ubuntu at retail with Vodacom in October, and the Vodacom Webbook – embedded with Ubuntu – is currently available to buy in over 1,200 stores in South Africa. The product has been selling well and over the coming weeks is expected to be one of the ‘must have’ Christmas gifts for this year.

What makes it so appealing ? Ubuntu runs seamlessly on the Webbook and it works brilliantly with a range of printers, cameras, MP3 players and other peripherals. Ubuntu brings a fresh emphasis on usability that millions of existing users around the world already enjoy.

Ubuntu boots up in seconds, delivering a bundle of applications right out of the box. It’s ready to go, reliable, and security is rock-solid. It’s as effective for business as for pleasure. With LibreOffice, you can create professional documents that are fully compatible with Microsoft Office (TM). Social networking through Twitter and Facebook is easily accessible too, with the ability to effortlessly share pictures, play music and edit video.

You can buy the Vodacom Webbook here.

Juju is Devops Distilled

Cloud deployment is different. It involves tighter devops handovers, the ability to scale services both up and down, and hybrid cloud computing: moving services between your private cloud and multiple public cloud providers.

Accelerated provisioning through IAAS has put the spotlight on friction in the deployment, configuration and management of services. This friction can only be overcome via a change in emphasis, from configuring machines to connecting services that can then be scaled independently. In other words, service orchestration.

With Juju, services can be deployed, connected, upgraded and re-used by defining them as Juju charms. Encapsulating service intelligence in charms enables you to separate deep service-specific skills from broad operations management skills.

This webinar, jointly presented by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and Clint Byrum, a devops expert, will cover cloud deployment and devops with Juju.

Register Now!

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.

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!

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.