Canonical Blog

The April release of the next LTS version of Ubuntu on server and desktop is certainly generating a lot of excitement internally, in our customer base and amongst our existing partners as the VAR Guy reflects.

Long-term support (LTS) releases, particularly on server have become the deployment platform for our users. Take a look at this result from our recent server survey (soon to be published in full – watch this space)

LTS usage outstrips all other releases on server

Which makes it all the more important that the ISV community at large is aware of the great opportunity that LTS offers. The user base of Ubuntu has dramatically increased since the last LTS release. Analyst figures are finally beginning to reflect the real impact that Ubuntu Server has had on the market. And we can all see the reach of the desktop product.

To that we announced a short series of webinars specifically for ISVs to make them aware of the business opportunity on 10.04 LTS and why they should be porting their apps for what is an easy and low cost way to extend their market.

Join us on the 24th or 25th of March to see information on the market opportunity, learn how easy it is to become a partner and how ot make your company and application part of the 10.04 story

March 24th, 9AMPT, 5pm GMT

Register for Desktop Webinar

Download data sheet on the opportunity for desktop ISVs

March 25th 9AM PT, 5pm GMT

Register for Server Webinar

Dowload data sheet on the opportunity for ISVs

See you there

Gerry Carr

Platform Marketing, Canonical

We are pleased to announce the launch of the brand new Ubuntu single sign on service.  The goal of this service is to provide a single, central login service for all Ubuntu-related sites, thus making it more convenient for Ubuntu users and community members to access information, communicate, and contribute.  This service will replace the existing Launchpad login service that is currently in use for many Ubuntu-related sites, although existing Launchpad accounts will continue to work in the new service.

Over the next few months we will be moving all of the Ubuntu and Canonical related sites that currently use the Launchpad service to Ubuntu single sign on, starting with sites we manage directly and then working with community site owners to move the community-managed sites.

Because of the number of existing Ubuntu users who have created accounts in Launchpad for the purpose of logging into other sites, we have set the Ubuntu and Launchpad services to share account data during the transition.  Launchpad is in the process of enabling users to log in with an Ubuntu account and, once completed, this sharing will be removed.  This does mean that you will be able to log into both services with the same credentials for a while.  We realise this is something internet users have been encouraged to not do but it is a necessary side-effect of the transition.  Doing this ensures you won’t lose access to services you’ve purchased from us in the past or your account histories in the sites you’ve previously visited, as long as you use your existing Launchpad credentials on Ubuntu single sign on.

Ubuntu single sign on is built on OpenID so, once all the sites we know about have moved over, we will also be opening up the OpenID service to enable you to log in to any site which accepts standard OpenIDs.

Some questions we think you may have for us:

Why replace the Launchpad login service?

The Launchpad login service has served us well for several years but Launchpad is not a familiar brand for many Ubuntu users.  As Ubuntu grows, we’ll see more and more users who don’t understand the connection between Launchpad and Ubuntu and the new Ubuntu login service is intended to overcome this problem.  It will also enable us to develop features which are more oriented to Ubuntu users.

How does the new service differ from the old one?

For now, not much apart from the appearance of the site.  We have many plans for great new features, however, and hope to roll these out once the service is established.  If you have ideas for other features you’d like to see in Ubuntu single sign on, we’d love to hear about them.

Is the new service Open Source?

No, it’s not.  It is, however, built and hosted on open source technologies (python, django, apache and postgres amongst others).

I have a problem with the new service.  Where can I get help?

We have an email support channel.  You can submit your support requests using our support form.  If you have found a bug, please take a few minutes to tell us about it on Launchpad.

We’re sure you have more questions.  Please submit them and we’ll do our best to respond to them all.

Stuart Metcalfe, Infrastructure Systems Development, Canonical

We are delighted to welcome Matt Asay to the Canonical fold, taking up the role of Chief Operating Officer with immediate effect. The details can be found in the press release. Matt has also written about the new challenge in his Open Road blog.

So all that remains to say here is how much the whole company is looking forward to working with and learning from Matt in the months and years to come.

Jane Silber

This week were very pleased to see three companies behind three great technologies announce their support for Ubuntu. In the run up to the LTS in late April we are keen that our users are aware of the growing number of application options that they can have on their preferred operating system. These will be a mix of open source solutions, the ‘enterprise’ version of open source solutions or  proprietary applications. A healthy and growing ecosystem is an obvious prerequisite for any successful OS.

PGP has extended its enterprise-focused data protection solutions to include Ubuntu in addition to Windows and Mac. For companies running a mixed environment (an increasingly common scenario as Ubuntu begins to find a place in businesses as a replacement technology) security and administrative concerns are reduced as the same tool can used whatever the choice of OS.

GroundWorks Open Source announced its support for Ubuntu Server. GWOS’ excellent systems monitoring and management tools will give users a great, low-cost option for their Ubuntu deployments, something that is very important as Ubuntu Server is pushed into larger and more critical use environments.

Finally LikeWise and the Ubuntu development team were able to confirm the latest version Likewise Open 5.4 has made the alpha of Ubuntu 10.04 where it will undergo rigorous testing for stability before confirmation in the release. Users from 9.10 and 8.04LTS will have a direct upgrade path at release and a version supported for five years when they do.

I hope you take time to consider these options as part of your Ubuntu deployment. Expect to see more of these types of announcements as we broaden support for the 10.04 release. We will also be able to give details soon of some programs for the ISVs themselves to more easily come on board with the LTS release and understand why it is a great addition to their portfolios. We’re looking well set for a great release.

Steve George, Corporate Services at Canonical

At Lotusphere today we announced the availability of the IBM Client for Smart Work complete with support from Canonical. It is a significant milestone both for potential end users and for the Canonical and IBM channel.

One of the gating factors to widespread adoption of Linux in the corporate desktop has been the perceived availability of the the required software stack on top of the operating system. While there have been various solutions available, either they have been too much work to assemble or self-support, or the feature set is not complete enough.

ICSW on Ubuntu offers the full set of replacement technologies for a typical Microsoft shop. Calendaring, scheduling, email and office productivity are all delivered via the Lotus product suite. There is access to Lotus Live which brings cloud-based services for those who prefer that route with minimal hardware overheads.

Lotus Live also delivers (deep breath) file sharing, document/content management, instant messaging, presence awareness, web conferencing, VoIP, IP telephony integration, application integration, mashups, blogs, wikis, community, social bookmarks, activities, profiles, portal,  and dashboards/scorecards depending on the level of subscription required. Which is an impressive feature set.

Ubuntu as the operating system also bring freedom from the licensing and upgrading cycle and allow the savings to be spent in more innovative ways. Canonical will support these infrastructures for as little as $5.50 per month for a typical 1000 seat installation. Compare that to the licensing and support for a Microsoft installation.

You can get an unsupported version of ICSW from the Ubuntu site today. IBM partners who would like to adding this product to their portfolio and reselling Ubuntu support should contact us here. Canonical partners can contact their account manager.

Steve George, Canonical

As Mark Shuttleworth has announced I will have the privilege of leading Canonical from March of next year. I am excited about the role, energised by the opportunities in front of us, and humbled by the collection of amazing and talented individuals in Canonical and the Ubuntu community.  Mark will continue to play a major role in Canonical, and we expect this to be a smooth transition.  We are making the announcement now in order to help ensure that.  We recognise that there will be many questions about this announcement, so Mark and I sat down together to try to answer those questions which we think will be on your minds.

When will Jane take over as CEO?

JS: We expect the changes to be completely in place by 1 March 2010.

Who is Jane?

JS: I wear, and have worn, many hats at Canonical. I am currently Chief Operating Officer and Director of Online Services. I joined Canonical in 2004, and since then have been closely involved in the establishment and management of most Canonical functions including Ubuntu One, OEM Services, Corporate Services, Marketing, Finance, Legal and others.  I have a technical background and started my career as a software developer, and have since held engineering and senior management positions at companies as diverse as a health and wellness promotion start up, a large technology and manufacturing company in Japan, and the US defence contractor General Dynamics. I am American, and came to the UK in 2002 to complete an MBA at Oxford. I learned about Canonical and Mark’s vision for Ubuntu while deciding whether to remain in England or return to the US, and haven’t looked back!

Does this mark a change of direction for the company?

MS: No, it doesn’t mark a change of direction.  Jane and I have worked closely together over the last 5 years, and while in her new role as CEO she will have the authority to make decisions which may differ from those I would make, we are aligned on our strategy and direction.  This change does mark our commitment to continually optimise our operations and offerings, and as Canonical matures as an organisation I believe that Jane brings the skills and experience that we need in the CEO role.

What will happen to Jane’s current responsibilities as COO and and as lead on the Ubuntu One project?

JS: I have always held quite a wide range of responsibilities at Canonical, and in the coming months we will begin an internal and external executive search to fill the key roles of COO and head of Ubuntu One. We expect that this will bolster the senior management experience within Canonical as a whole, which will also help support our growth and accelerate progress towards our goals.

How will this impact Mark’s role on the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board?

MS: This change will have no bearing on my role on the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board.  We will continue to expand the Ubuntu governance structures as the project and Ubuntu community grow but I am not moving away or relinquishing any community role I hold.

JS: One thing this move will bring about is a clearer separation of the role of CEO of Canonical and the leader of the Ubuntu community. It will be two different people now, which I think will be helpful in both achieving their joint and individual goals more quickly.

Can you share some more detail on what Mark’s role will be?

MS: I will focus on my passions of product design and development. I want Ubuntu to succeed as the open platform of choice for almost all use types whether on netbook, notebook, desktop, server, embedded device or wherever people compute. That is a large undertaking and being able to focus on that, thanks to Jane, is a great privilege. I will also spend more time talking to and visiting partners and customers about what they demand from an open platform and feeding that back into the product through the community and Canonical.

Was there consideration of getting a new CEO from outside of Canonical?

MS: I considered it, but ultimately decided that Jane’s background, experience with Canonical, and the skills she brings to the table are exactly what Canonical needs at this point.

Is Mark transitioning away from the Ubuntu project? Will this affect Mark’s funding of the Ubuntu project or is Canonical able to fund it without Mark now?

MS: I am more committed now than I have ever been. This is all about focus. I will continue to be engaged, will fund the project as needed, and have the opportunity now to focus on the areas where I can make the biggest impact.

How will Mark and Matt Zimmerman work together with Mark’s increased focus on product?

MS: I work with the leaders of each of the teams that have products at Canonical, the most visible of which is the Ubuntu team lead by Matt. While Matt will report to Jane, reflecting the central nature of Ubuntu to Canonical’s range of services, I will continue to engage with the Ubuntu team through the existing design, development and community processes that I currently use to influence the direction of the distribution.

What changes will partners and/or customers notice?

JS: We intend the transition to be a smooth one so in the immediate term it will be business as usual. Over the medium term we think this will better align the skills that each of us has and therefore there should be positive benefits for all who are involved in the Ubuntu and Canonical universes.

Jane Silber, COO Canonical

The Ubuntu Server Team wants to know how you use Ubuntu Server Edition in day-to-day operations to help the team prioritize the support and development of the product.  This is the second edition of this initiative which was first introduced in 2008.

In an effort to better understand, support and further the Ubuntu Server Edition we would like to ask you to take this survey which should take between 15 to 30 minutes to complete. The information provided will help us determine where we can improve support, where to add additional resources and to generate a better understanding of the community which we work within.

Please note that this survey is being conducted by the Ubuntu Server Team community together with the Canonical Product Management. Information about the team is available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/

To take the survey, please go to http://survey.ubuntu.com/

Thanks

Nick Barcet, Ubuntu Server Edition product manager

Congratulations to Google on the open sourcing of Google Chrome OS

When Chrome OS was announced in June we saw this as a positive development, bringing choice to the consumer. We considered how open source development is as much about co-operation as it is about competition. Google have made it clear that they are keen to develop Chrome OS openly and we have had the pleasure of hosting a number of the Google team at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas over the last few days where we have been able to see that openness in action.

In the interest of transparency, we should declare that Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract.  In our discussions, Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson made it clear that they want , wherever feasible,  to build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention.   This clear focus should benefit a wide variety of existing projects and we welcome it.

On the consumer side, people will ask about the positioning of Chrome OS and Ubuntu. While the two operating systems share some core components, Google Chrome OS will provide a very different experience to Ubuntu.  Ubuntu will continue to be a general purpose OS running both web and native applications such as OpenOffice and will not require specialised hardware.

So 2010 looks set to be a very exciting year. In addition to delivering Ubuntu experiences with both existing and new OEM partners, we will be working with Google on Chrome OS based devices.

Chris Kenyon  VP of OEM Services, Canonical

Gavin Clark at the Register recently reported that only 10% of people upgrading to 9.10 had a satisfactory experience. Serdar Yegalup at Information Week then reported that 40% of people upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 had issues that they considered unfixable. Both of these conclusion were based on a poll on the Ubuntu support forums.

Serdar had the wisdom to point out that the poll is self-selecting (but still reported it). However, and I write this so you heard it here first, I don’t think we will have to wait long for a Microsoft shill to report his figure as fact and reference Information Week as evidence.

So let’s look at this poll. While we don’t have exact figures it is reasonable to assume that hundreds of thousands of people upgraded to 9.10 in the last few days. The quoted poll has a sample of 2158.

The poll is also on a support forum.

I upgraded to 9.10 a while ago. Flawlessly. So I saw little need to go tell a forum. This is where people go when they have problems. Gavin and Serdar were shocked to find people with support issues on a support forum. I have no doubt the help line at Microsoft has taken a lot of calls recently, but I would not extrapolate from that a large percentage of Windows users are having upgrade problems.

Tellingly and almost the last word on this are the polls from our previous releases, none of which were considered or reported as upgrade disasters:

Jaunty Poll

Intrepid Poll `

Hardy Poll

Gutsy Poll

A very useful summary of these findings by Nicholas Ipsen is here. I am linking to these polls not because I want to provide evidence that the Karmic upgrade experience is or was good or bad, there are other more qualified to comment on that, but that there is nothing new here.

All this of course is of little consolation if you are affected by an issue. Which is why we have the forums and Launchpad so that we can gather data, isolate the issues and fix them if they are an issue with Ubuntu or alert someone who can if they are not. We do this all the time with every release and we are doing it with Ubuntu 9.10.

So what we seem to have here is a poll that has existed for some 5 releases being ‘discovered’ and the data used to support a pre-disposed position. As we operate in the open and publish feedback good and bad, this is the risk we take I guess. Gavin and Serdar had some broader points that we could engage on regarding the readiness or otherwise of Linux for mainstream computing. But to base or support their arguments on this poll does little to illuminate and a lot to obfuscate.

Gerry Carr

Head of platform marketing, Canonical

Cloud management dominates the theme for Landscape 1.4 with new features that allow you to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as easily as you manage your instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC from within Landscape. Users simply enter their credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or EC2 at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same page allowing you manage all your physical, virtuali and Cloud instances in one place.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to minimise the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts in the future.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to tag computers performing the same function and update them with a single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags, assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you can use what ever criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at www.canonical.com/landscape

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager