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!
One of the benefits of the direction that’s been taken with the next release of Ubuntu is that there is no longer a need for a separate netbook edition. The introduction of the new shell for Ubuntu means that we have a user interface that works equally well whatever the form factor of the PC. And the underlying technology works on a range of architectures including those common in netbook, notebooks, desktops or whatever you choose to run it on. Hence the need for a separate version for netbooks is removed.
To be clear, this is the opposite of us withdrawing from the netbook market. In fact looking at the download figures on ubuntu.com interest in netbooks is not only thriving but booming. It’s us recognising that the market has moved on and celebrating that separate images are no longer a requirement as the much anticipated convergence of devices moves closer.
A return to the Ubuntu name
Which actually got us thinking about our naming conventions in totality. ‘Ubuntu Desktop Edition’ arose in 2005 as a response to the launch of Ubuntu Server Edition and our desire to distinguish between the two. But desktops are no longer the pre-eminent client platform. And actually naming the the ‘edition’ after any target technology is going to have us chasing the trend. Also we were tying ourselves to some ungainly product titles – Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition for instance. User feedback also told us that people thought the edition was not for them as they had a laptop and spent time looking for a ‘Laptop Edition’.
So we are going back to our roots. From 11.04 the core product that you run on your PC will be simply, Ubuntu. Therefore the next release will be Ubuntu 11.04 and you can run that, my friend, on anything you like from a netbook to a notebook to a desktop. Ubuntu Server will be maintained as a separate product of course and named simply, Ubuntu Server 11.04.
We think this will make things simpler. When we mean Ubuntu for notebooks we will say just that rather than the more confusing, ‘Ubuntu Desktop Edition for notebooks’. We are retaining the concept of ‘remixes’ for community projects and the naming convention therein. And we would love to hear what you think.
We made a small flurry of announcements last week, all of which were related to cloud computing. I think it is worthwhile to put some context around Ubuntu and the cloud and explain a little more about where we are with this critical strategic strand for our beloved OS.
First of all, the announcements. We announced the release of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Dell servers. This is a hugely significant advance in the realm of internal cloud provision. It’s essentially formalising a lot of the bespoke work that Dell has done in huge data centres (based on a variety of OSes) and making similar technology available for smaller deployments. We attended the Dell sales summit in Las Vegas and we were very encouraged to meet with many of the Dell salespeople whose job it will be to deliver this to their customers. This is a big company, backing a leading technology and encouraging businesses to start their investigations of cloud computing in a very real way.
More or less simultaneously, we announced our formal support for the OpenStack project and the inclusion of their Bexar release in our next version of Ubuntu, 11.04. This will be in addition to Eucalyptus, it is worth stating. Eucalyptus is the technology at the core of UEC – and will be in Ubuntu 11.04 – as it has been since 9.04. Including two stacks has caused some raised eyebrows but it is not an unusual position for Ubuntu. While we look to pick one technology for integration into the platform in order to deliver the best user experience possible, we also want to make sure that users have access to the best and most up to date free and open-source software. The increasing speed of innovation that cloud computing is driving has meant that Ubuntu, with its 6 month release cadence, is able to deliver the tools and programs that developers and admins want before any other operating system.
Users will ultimately decide what deployment scenarios each stack best suits. Eucalyptus certainly has the advantage of maturity right now, especially for internal cloud deployments. OpenStack, meanwhile, continue to focus on rapid feature development and, given its heritage, has appeal to service providers looking to stand up their own public clouds. Wherever the technology is deployed, be it in the enterprise or for public clouds, we want Ubuntu to be the underlying infrastructure for all the scenarios and will continue to direct our platform team to deliver the most tightly integrated solution possible.
Finally we saw our partner Autonomic Resources announce UEC is now available for purchase by Federal US government buyers. This is the first step on a long road the federal deployment, as anyone familiar with the governmental buying cycles will realise. But it is a good example of the built-to-purpose cloud environments that we will see more of – with the common denominator of Ubuntu at the core of it.
Which actually raises an interesting question – why is it that Ubuntu is at the heart of cloud computing? Perhaps we ought to look at more evidence before the theory. In addition to being the OS at the heart of new cloud infrastructures, we are seeing enormous usage of Ubuntu as the guest OS on the big public clouds, such as AWS and Rackspace, for instance. It is probably the most popular OS on those environments and others – contact your vendor to confirm
So why is this OS that most incumbent vendors would dismiss as fringe, seeing such popularity in this new(ish) wave of computing? Well there are a host of technical reasons to do with modularity, footprint, image maintenance etc. But they are better expressed by others.
I think the reason for Ubuntu’s prominence is because it is innovation made easy. Getting on and doing things on Ubuntu is a friction-free experience. We meet more and more tech entrepreneurs who tell us how they have built more than one business on Ubuntu on the cloud. Removing licence costs and restrictions allows people to get to the market quickly.
But beyond speed, it is also about reducing risk. With open-source now firmly established in the IT industry, and with the term open used so promiscuously, it is easy to forget that the economic benefits of truly free, open-source software. The combination of cloud computing, where scale matters, and open source is a natural one and this is why Ubuntu is the answer for those who need the reassurance that they can both scale quickly but also avoid vendor lock-in in the long-term.
More specifically, and this brings us back to the announcements, there are now clear scenarios where users can reach a point where even the economics of a licence-free software on a public cloud start to break down. At a certain stage it is simply cheaper to make the hardware investment to run your own cloud infrastructure. Or there might be regulatory, cultural or a host of other reasons for wanting cloud-like efficiencies built on internal servers.
The work we have done with OpenStack and with Eucalyptus means Ubuntu is an ideal infrastructure on which to build a cloud. This will typically be for the internal provision of a cloud environment but equally could be the basis or a new public cloud. It is entirely open as to the type of guest OS and in all cases continues to support the dominant API of Amazon EC2, ensuring portability for those writing applications.
And as we have seen, Ubuntu is the ultimate OS to deploy in a cloud and with which to build a cloud. No-one provides more up-to-date images on the most popular public cloud platforms. Our work to ensure compatibility to the most popular standards means that those guests will run just as well on a UEC cloud however that is deployed – either internally or for cloud provision externally.
So technology moves markets. Economics does too, only more so. Ubuntu has come at the right point in our short IT history to ride both waves. The scale is there, the standards are emerging and the ability to provide an answer to the choice between running a cloud or running on a cloud is more fully realised on Ubuntu than on any other OS – open source or not.
Please join Canonical and Centrify on Thursday, 2 December 2010 at 9 a.m. PST to learn how organizations are enabling the broader deployment of Ubuntu by integrating it into their existing Active Directory infrastructure and management processes. By using Centrify’s Canonical-certified solution, they can go beyond simply offering transparent sign-on to Ubuntu systems and can in addition deliver on many requirements for enterprise deployments.
The amount of data that is generated continues to grow rapidly. The result is organizations spending significant financial and personnel resources expanding and managing their data centres to administer, manage and capture the data that results from such growth.
Please join IBM and Canonical on Tuesday, 16 November 2010 at 9:00am PDT / 12:00noon EDT / 15:00pm GMT to hear how the combination of IBM and Canonical technologies help organizations build or expand a data centre operating environment that IT staff can rely on and quickly incorporate for significantly lower cost than competing alternatives. Learn how to lower the cost of your data centre and make the data centre work more efficiently, enabling users to experience more for less. Register for “Lower the cost of your data centre with IBM and Canonical webcast”.
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