ubuntu

I admit that I nearly got caught up in my former colleague James Urquhart's excellent analysis of Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 release, code-named Karmic Koala. I saw the word "open" laced heavily through the post, and given Canonical's commitment to fully open-source Ubuntu experience, I played along.

But something doesn't quite fit in Canonical's story.

It's called Amazon.com. Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 will give users an option to build its own Elastic Compute Cloud-style service, using open-source Eucalyptus (or another cloud provider), but the intent certainly seems to seamlessly plug users … Read more

As we try to figure out the future of the cloud, one thing is assured: developers will drive both deployment and consumption approaches. As is common to so many other major software shifts, developers lead, regardless of what vendors want the market to look like.

With the exception of Amazon.com and Google, neither of which are IT stalwarts, there hasn't been much to write home about from the obvious big vendors. IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have all made proclamations, with only Microsoft offering much in the way of a system to test-drive, let alone deploy. … Read more

Ubuntu 9.10 will be code-named Karmic Koala, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced on a posting on the ubuntu-devel-announce list Friday. As usual, efforts surrounding the Linux distribution are divided between two target deployments, desktop and server. The desktop goals are primarily around "first impressions," with Shuttleworth indicating that "boot will be beautiful." He also promises that the appearance of Ubuntu will change significantly:

The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it - we're now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

I am sure others here at CNET will give the desktop portions of the announcement the serious treatment it deserves, but the server functionality that Shuttleworth announced is much more interesting to the cloud-computing community.… Read more

What's the takeaway when one free operating system displaces another when running your application?

That's the question I'd be asking myself at Groundwork in the wake of news from the Works with U blog that 29 percent of its new users are using Ubuntu to power its IT management application instead of CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. When your users are falling all over themselves to avoid paying for an operating system, can the application be far behind?

Within my own company, we weight leads heavier if they are running our application with a paid … Read more

Ubuntu must be giving Microsoft fits on the desktop. That's the only reason I can come up with for Microsoft's LinkedIn search for a new director of open-source strategy, with a focus on the desktop:

The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.

Given Red Hat's relative inaction on the desktop, this position likely will focus on Novell and Canonical's Ubuntu, but of these two, only Ubuntu's desktop is really catching the imagination of the market.… Read more

There are a lot of Netbooks on the market that are more or less the same, save for some cosmetic details. One of the Netbooks that manages to stand out from the pack is the HP Mini 1000 MIE, which sports a custom interface that sits on top of the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

HP now plans to make that interface available to the public, according to Download Squad. Netbook prices can be cut way down when they don't have Windows installed, which is why HP offers a Linux option. The MIE interface is intended to shield users from … Read more

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, and analyst firm RedMonk have released survey results that show usage patterns for the Ubuntu server product.

The survey, completed by nearly 7,000 respondents, shows that Ubuntu Server Edition is being used for most enterprise tasks, such as Web sites, files, databases, and mail servers, and is considered "mission-critical" by most respondents.

This is an interesting set of results, even if they are biased, considering that Ubuntu has largely been known for its desktop grace and focus on developing a better Linux user experience. But the enterprise is where all … Read more

Perhaps you didn't notice, but 2008 marked the last year when SourceForge downloads mattered.

Throughout the year, and for a consistent period of several months, the statistics function on SourceForge stopped working. My own company, which had been tracking our downloads closely, suddenly was flying blindly.

Guess what? Life went on. Not only that, but we moved our central downloads repository to our own Web site because we needed consistency that SourceForge apparently couldn't give us. It also became obvious that download tallies were secondary to something SourceForge never gave us: insight into those downloading our software.

The … Read more

Just seven days after Bastille Day, France's day for celebrating its freedom, Ubuntu will unfetter Launchpad as an open-source project, as announced on the Launchpad news blog.

Launchpad is an open-source project-hosting service that promises to make it "easy to share code, bug reports, translations, and ideas across projects." It's a great service--so robust that MySQL moved its project hosting to Launchpad in early 2008--but has been proprietary, and will remain so until it goes open source on July 21.

I'm a big fan of Launchpad and expect that opening up its source code … Read more