The Ubuntu Certification Website has just got better. We have roll-out improvements to how we list systems and provided a powerful search feature. We want to ensure that you get as quick as possible to the information that you need.
As part of the Certification website, we provide a feedback mechanism through Launchpad Answers. Over the last year, we have seen a trend of questions around:
Most models are sold with different graphics cards , processors… so which one is the one listed as certified?
Does the system listed as certified works with a version of Ubuntu that I can download from Ubuntu.com? Or only with the one that the manufacturer sales?
What release is this model certified for?
To address these questions, we have introduced some changes to the website. We now display what components are included on the certified system in the search results. We’ve also added a icon to indicate if the system is only certified with a vendor image or with the standard Ubuntu image.
The new and simpler search interface eliminates confusion on what data is presented. A small filter box has been added to the website allowing users to select the device type, Ubuntu release and image type that they are interested in.
If you have any comments on the new website design, I would really like to hear from you!
The latest Ubuntu In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) Remix is released as of December 2011. This release contains a number of updates and bugfixes from the previous Beta 1 release, as well as a targeted kernel from the Ubuntu kernel tree. It is now fully in sync with the standard Ubuntu desktop and server releases, allowing developers to use the same libraries and tools for development on the desktop and deployment in an IVI system. Disk footprint and boot times continue to be improved, with a footprint of 508MB on target hardware and boot times twice as fast as the Beta 1 release.
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.
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.
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
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 C64xDSP, 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.
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.
Fitting more computing capacity into a limited power envelope is one of the key challenges facing data centre designers today. It impacts companies whether they are building a £500 million data centre or simply working how much compute that can fit into a couple of racks at a shared facility.
One of the emerging approaches to solving this problem is to look at the technologies in low power-consumption appliances like phones and applying them to dense clusters in server-like configurations. Whether it is in smartphones, tablets or other embedded systems, the processor at the heart of these low power devices is generally ARM-based.
With Ubuntu Server becoming the de-facto standard for cloud infrastructure and big data solutions, we recognise that power consumption is key to efficient scaling. Building on four years of working with ARM, we are now taking the step of supporting Ubuntu Server on ARM. We expect these processors to be used in a variety of use cases including microservers.
This is a first step and there will be many revisions of processors, hardware designs and of software as the performance and supported server workloads optimised for ARM grow over the next four years. It is, however, a first crucial step towards a new technology and one where yet again open-source innovation leads.
The new addition to the Ubuntu family | First release in October 2011
In October, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release will be simultaneously available for x86, x86-64 and ARM-based architectures. The base image of the releases will be the same across architectures with a common kernel baseline. The ARM architecture will also be part of the long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Server in 12.04 and other future releases.
Initial development focus and optimisation will be around the most popular Ubuntu workloads of web/network infrastructure and distributed data processing via NoSQL or big data applications where workloads typically use hundreds or thousands of systems.
Get involved
The Ubuntu Server on ARM initiative is a multi-year initiative gathering broad participation. More project information can be found on the Ubuntu wiki
Hardware partners, ISVs and open-source application developers keen to join existing partners around Ubuntu Server on ARM should contact us via our partner enquiry form.
Canonical can give details of more machines coming online from Lenovo in the Chinese consumer market.
There are now over 30 Lenovo ThinkPads certified with Ubuntu, with many of these being completed in the first half of 2011. The great work with Lenovo continues. .
Click here to access the link for the latest certified hardware.
The ThinkPads, pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.10 on Intel and AMD processors are available to purchase today in China. The model list includes the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14, the latest consumer and small business-oriented ThinkPad from Lenovo.
Having hardware certified through Canonical provides consumers and corporate user the assurance of a high-quality, user-friendly, maintainable operating system on every device. The key benefits of combining Ubuntu with Lenovo Thinkpads is the hassle free operation and a fast reliable performance.
See Lenovo’s link for Linux certified hardware online here. You can currently purchase a device in China from a Lenovo store directly or online from 360buy.com.
Contact oem@canonical.com to find out more about certifying and pre-installing devices with Ubuntu.
It’s with some regret that we are announcing the end of the ShipIt Programme and the CD distributor programme. When we started ShipIt in 2005 broadband was still a marketing promise even in the most connected parts of the most developed nations. We knew that this represented a significant stumbling block to the adoption of a new technology like Ubuntu. So we invested in making the CDs free and freely delivered to anywhere in the world. Since then we have shipped millions of CDs to every country in the world and brought Ubuntu into the lives of millions of individuals, we hope making them a little better.
Technology moves on and as we look at ways to spread Ubuntu further, a CD distribution programme, especially one of that size and delivered in that way, makes less sense. We have been slowly easing back the programme over the last two years to limit the number of CDs per person and the number of times a person could apply for a CD. But for Ubuntu 11.04 you will no longer be able to go to our website and apply for a free CD.
Going LoCo
That’s not to say there won’t be CDs. We are going to make large numbers of CDs available to the Ubuntu Local Communities (LoCos) through a shipIt-lite program. We are asking the LoCos, who are much better placed than Canonical in many ways, to find creative ways to get CDs to those that need them. And of course, every single person reading this who has a CD is a potential distributor – it is after all free to copy, modify and redistribute. We will also continue to make the packs available through the store which are sold more or less at cost price (plus shipping).
CD distributors
We also decided to take a look at the CD distributor programme that we have had running for some time. The volume of CDs distributed through this programme is relatively low but the administrative burden for the programme is surprisingly high for Canonical. Of course everyone is still welcome to simply go to the Canonical store and buy and redistribute CDs. All that changes is that there is no need for an official blessing from Canonical and we will no longer list the websites on ubuntu.com. We encourage them to continue to promote Ubuntu and provide this great technology in their local market.
Where’s the money going?
With the removal of the ShipIt programme some may ask what we are going to do with the money we save. Firstly there is still significant cost in CDs for LoCos and those we produce for events and other distribution methods. Soon we will launch a free online trial for Ubuntu using the goodness of the cloud which will be a great first step for Windows users in particular, allowing them to see for themselves the product that so many of us enjoy. Finally, we will we be doing much more this year to reach out to the mainstream markets across the world, to bring Ubuntu to the next wave of users. This great project of ours needs more and different people to come on board so that we can bring free software into everyday computing lives. Onwards and upwards!
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