Every time I write about Ubuntu and its (not-so) new Unity interface, I see lots and lots of comments decrying it as useless, an abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to computers, etc. Personally, I’m not so flummoxed by it, but there’s no denying that Unity has been a divisive addition to Canonical’s flagship Linux distribution. The choice to move application menus up to the global bar at the top of the screen has been frustrating to many, and a lot of power users find Unity too mouse-intensive. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, yesterday unveiled the next step in the Unity evolution: the Head-Up Display.

According to Shuttleworth, their testing revealed that “users spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, navigating the menus of their applications, either to learn about the capabilities of the app, or to take a specific action.” The goal of the new Head-Up display is to — eventually — replace menus altogether. Instead of clicking through menus, users type the command they require in a search box. It may sound a bit counter-intuitive at first blush, but take a look at this video for a few examples:

Certainly typing “undo” is not a particularly good example of efficiency, but it’s important to remember that not everyone can commit “CTRL+Z” to memory. If you know what you want to do, typing it into an assisted search box may well be faster than navigating nested menus or memorizing arcance key combinations. As Shuttleworth notes, “Hotkeys are a sort of mental gymnastics, the HUD is a continuation of mental flow.” And for power users who railed against the importance of the mouse in Unity to date, the HUD should be a welcome first step toward a better all-keyboard experience.

Shuttleworth also mentions that the long-term goals of the HUD include full voice integration, allowing you to simply say the word “undo” rather than type it.

Before you start casting aspersions, do read Shuttleworth’s blog post about the HUD. It’s worth a couple minutes of your time.

CES is upon us, and is no doubt chock full of the usual suspects of consumer electronics OEMs, ODMs, and more. One interesting new attendee this year is Canonical, the folks behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. Canonical is making a big push to get Ubuntu onto more than just desktops and laptops, and have been busy building relationships with CE companies to get it onto tablets, phones, and automobile in-vehicle infotainment displays. We’ll see Ubuntu make appearances at several booths to demo this work. Canonical will also be announcing Ubuntu TV.

Tablets, phones, IVI systems and Ubuntu TV are a far cry from Ubuntu’s humble beginnings as an easy to use Linux desktop. “Linux for human beings” has always been Ubuntu’s tagline, not “Linux for human being’s portable electronic devices.” So one might be forgiven for asking “WTF, Canonical?” I posed a slightly more polite version of that question to Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

According to her, CES 2012 will be the first glimpse of an expansion of Ubuntu’s reach across a spectrum of consumer devices. Canonical has a broad multi-screen strategy, and much of their work on the Unity interface to date has been laying the foundation for that strategy. Moreover, the work on Unity is just one example of Canonical’s efforts to move beyond being simply an integrator of components for a functional desktop Linux experience. Their Software Center is another example, as an effort to reward application devlopers. They’ve been working with OEMs to assist in product development. There’s also UbuntuOne, their cloud storage and synchronization service. And Canonical has been working hard to develop touch interface support in the Linux world, as well as driving better ARM support.

Ubuntu TV is to be the first proof point of this new strategy. Silber says that you’ll be able to watch your own media files, streaming media, or broadcast media. The goal is to combine all of these media sources without radically changing user behavior. Specifically, Ubuntu TV is not simply a Linux desktop on your TV. Canonical, says Silber, does not believe in the “browser on your TV” experience. “Browsers belong on secondary devices — tablets, phones, etc,” Silber told me.

Playing on the Ubuntu tagline, Silber claims Ubuntu TV is “TV for human beings. It just works.” As you can see from the images, Ubuntu TV will have a similar interface to the current Ubuntu desktop, with the launcher on the side, but there will be fundamental differences. The goal is to make Ubuntu TV the “OS for your television”, and not necessarily a set-top box. In that regard, Canonical is working with hardware partners to execute Ubuntu TV. It should be clear at this point that while Canonical has made great strides with it, Ubuntu TV it is not, yet, a finished product. They’ll be demoing working code at CES, but we shouldn’t expect working hardware for a little while yet.

I pointed out to Silber that there is a large, vocal body of people who despise the Unity interface, and asked whether it was really a good idea to extend that for media consumption purposes. Silber, like most poeple at Canonical, remained firm that their user testing bore out the merits of Unity. “Judge us by our actions, but also by our results,” she said. As you might recall, the first version of Ubuntu to ship Unity was also the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu TV will be open source, and we should expect an application development framework from Canonical. I asked Silber about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and how Canonical was working with content producers and distributors. I specifically wanted to know whether Canonical was drawing any lines in the sand with respect to the kinds of content that would be playable on Ubuntu TV. She said that they’re making an effort to reduce the proliferation of DRM, but they recognize that they’re late to this party and have a lot of work ahead of them. Silber acknowledged that Canonical is involved with UltraViolet, stating that “it helps simplify things from our perspective” with respect to encodings and DRM.

According to Silber, the biggest hurdle for Ubuntu TV is breaking down all the walled gardens that content producers and rightsholders have erected. Every studio wants you to watch their content on their website, with their widgets, and their advertising — all under their control. Canonical believes that there should be a single, elegant interface for consuming media, regardless of the content source. Silber believes that Canonical and Ubuntu represent a reasonable middle ground as a relatively vendor-neutral solution to this problem. Canonical isn’t in the media production business, nor are they in the hardware manufacturing business: they just want to be the OS for your TV (for now).

That notion of “reasonable middle ground” extends beyond just Ubuntu TV. As Canonical pushes to get Ubuntu onto more devices, Silber says that many CE manufacturers are looking for a third option to the iOS / Android hegemony. Again Silber admits that Canonical is late to this game, but this does allow them to learn from the mistakes of the trailblazers, as well as to identify under-served markets. Device manufacturers want a platform for innovation that supports post-sale service revenues in ways that Apple and Google aren’t satisfying. They’re also increasingly aware that upgrades are fundamentally important to the successful longevity of their products. Canonical, according to Silber, is a smaller, easier to work with partner that has a proven rhythm for releasing major updates.

While Ubuntu TV is still a developing product, it’s a positive sign of things to come from Canonical. Silber assured me that we should expect additional news throughout the year that demonstrates the viability of Ubuntu as a platform across multiple consumer devices. With UbuntuOne as a data synchronization service to connect Ubuntu-powered devices, I think we can expect interesting things in the way of converged user experiences from Canonical in 2012.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, starting today in Florida, is a gathering of Canonical employees, industry partners and Ubuntu community members to “define the focus and plans for [the] up-coming version of Ubuntu”. That version, 12.04 codenamed “Precise Pangolin”, will be released in April of 2012 and will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of the distribution. The changes scheduled for 12.04 are interesting, and simultaneously represent the current state of the art of the Ubuntu distribution as well as represent the foundation on which future developments will be built. I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Benevolent Dictator For Life, about what to expect in Ubuntu 12.04 and beyond.

First and foremost, Shuttleworth pointed out that the support schedule for 12.04 has been extended from three to five years on the desktop. Ubuntu LTS releases have historically provided three years of support on the desktop (five on the server), with new LTS versions coming out every two years. With 12.04, desktop users will enjoy support through 2017, which is a pretty long time to offer support for a desktop operating system.

I asked Shuttleworth what the motivation was for extending the 12.04 support offering on the desktop and he immediately responded “corporate deployments.” There are a number of companies standardizing on Ubuntu for their desktop computing needs, and the three year support from prior LTS releases was proving inadequate. Large corporations don’t adopt the latest and greatest technologies quickly, and they often have long QA processes to ensure that new desktop operating systems will properly function with their fleet of legacy applications. (Just look at how many companies are still in the transition process from Windows XP to Windows 7!)

Shuttleworth pointed out that there’s a growing change in attitude toward corporate computing. As more and more applications move “to the cloud”, IT departments are seeing that there’s less and less need for expensive desktop lock-in. Something like Ubuntu provides sufficient computing resources for a great many environments, and is free from licensing fees.

Ubuntu 12.04 will be the conclusion of the current two year LTS cycle, which will include four total releases: Maverick Meerkat (10.10), Natty Narwhal (11.04), Oneiric Ocelot (11.10). After the release of Precise Panglon, Shuttleworth and Canonical plan to get cracking on 14.04, the next LTS version (not yet codenamed). The work building up to 14.04 will, according to Shuttleworth, challenge the Ubuntu community and Canonical’s partners to exceed the status quo.

In the meantime, the conversations at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week will be the beginning of public conversations around the notion of “Ubuntu on devices”. There’s already been a lot of internal conversation on this subject, and some engagement with industry partners (witness the recently launched Ubuntu webbook in South Africa), but UDS will really open these conversations up for community participation.

Shuttleworth reminded me that the Ubuntu tagline has always been “Linux for human beings.” He went on to note, though, that human beings computing — and will continue to compute — using a lot more than the legacy PC. Webbooks are just one small subset of devices on which Shuttleworth has his eye. There’s also phones, tablets, and “smart screens” — intelligent devices with limited input mechanisms like televisions, in-dash automotive displays, and more.

Unity, the user interface rolled out in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and officially adopted as the default desktop interface in Ubuntu 11.04, lays the foundation for future development of Ubuntu on devices. One of the major thrusts of Unity was to embrace alternate computing form factors while still presenting a reasonably consistent user interface. Unity was refined in Ubuntu 11.10, and will continue to be refined in 12.04 and beyond. The lens framework will grow, and presumably third-party lens contributions will make the Unity experience smoother for all Ubuntu users.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Unity without hearing some vocal body of people complain about it. As a long-time Ubuntu user, I admit I found the transition a little challenging and I still experience some frustrations with it today. I asked Shuttleworth about this, specifically looking to learn what Canonical might know about user feedback that doesn’t get heavy publicity.

Shuttleworth was obviously prepared for this kind of question because he started his response by saying “We don’t know exactly how many people are using Ubuntu, but we have a pretty good estimate based on download numbers and watching browser user agent strings. I can tell you that Ubuntu 11.04, the first to offer Unity, was the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu to date.” Whether this was simply a natural growth in the Ubuntu user base, or people being curious about the new interface, is hard to tell.

Shuttleworth went on to describe the user testing that Canonical performs on each version of Ubuntu. They do real-world performance testing using randomly selected focus groups: people who may or may not be comfortable doing any number of computing tasks. Canonical asks these folks to perform a variety of real-world things (get photos off a digital camera and posted to Facebook, for example) and watches their performance. With each successive iteration of Ubuntu, they’re able to document how much easier these tasks are (or are not) and adjust their development priorities accordingly.

All key design issues are evaluated in the context of these tests. According to Shuttleworth, “people get much more done, from scratch, when presented with 11.10 versus 11.04 or any prior release of Ubuntu.” The obvious goal is to continue that trend into 12.04 and beyond.

“Ease of use is not incompatible with power users,” he went on, noting that some of the most vocal complaints against Unity come from the most technical of users: people who consider “computing” to be having a dozen terminal windows open across multiple virtual desktops. Shuttleworth acknowledged that Unity in its current form might not be ideal for those kinds of users, but noted that it’s not impossible to reconcile the two. As an example, he pointed out that a great many Linux developers are today using Macs running OSX. Clearly OSX has staked its livelihood on “ease of use”, and has been remarkably successful. And yet power users are using it more and more. Shuttleworth is sure that the Linux desktop can strike a similar balance. Expect to hear more about this from UDS this week.

One of the big features introduced in 11.10 was the Ubuntu Software Center. Of particular interest with this is the proliferation of proprietary, closed source software. I asked Shuttleworth about this. “We celebrate freedom!” was his immediate response. Users are free to get stuff done, and free to get it done using the software they want to run. According to Shuttleworth, it is not Canonical’s place to enforce their software morality onto their users. Sure, they’d love to see everyone being successful with exclusively free software, but on the whole they’re pragmatic enough to know that their users may want — indeed, demand — something else. According to Shuttleworth this stance is the result of many heated discussions inside Canonical, and not everyone is happy with it. Nonetheless, Shuttleworth is very proud of the fact that many commercial developers are working to run their software atop Ubuntu, and Canonical wants to support them as much as possible, with the Software Center and the developer.ubuntu.com portal.

After talking about desktops for a bit, I shifted the conversation to servers, virtualization and cloud computing. I noted that Ubuntu and Canonical don’t seem to be as aggressively pursuing virtualization as Red Hat, who is making a big push with their Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product and the oVirt project. Shuttleworth pointed out that Ubuntu was the first major distribution to make KVM a core part of their distribution. With that said, however, he acknowledged that they’re largely favoring cloud over virtualization.

Shuttleworth observed that Ubuntu is the most popular guest OS across all public cloud environments. Canonical wants to extend that to be the most popular base OS for cloud servers as well. HP’s recent decision to use Ubuntu as their preferred host distribution is one small step toward that goal.

He identifies Amazon Web Services as the de facto standard for cloud solutions: anyone looking to deploy a cloud offering today must be API compatible with Amazon. AWS controls much of the conversation simply by enjoying “first mover” status. Despite much effort by other proprietary companies like Oracle and VMware, Shuttleworth doesn’t think any of these others have any chance of significantly influencing the cloud conversation.

Canonical is pushing “cloud by default” by providing all the necessary features to run a cloud infrastructure with their core server offering. Canonical has thrown their weight behind OpenStack, which Shuttleworth identifies as the clear leader in open source cloud solutions. OpenStack was distributed as a component of Ubuntu 11.10 and according to Shuttleworth you should be able to deploy an N-node cloud in 15 minutes using just the core Ubuntu Server download.

Cloud is just a flattening of infrastructure, says Shuttleworth: “it’s just compute, storage, network and credentials.” In his mind, “building 50 servers is pretty much the same as building a 50-node cloud.” That is to say, it’s not really hard — or all that time consuming — today to provision 50 physical servers. Rolling out a cloud infrastructure should be as easy. He expects to see this made even easier with Ubuntu 12.04.

This raises some questions, though, as to how Canonical will reconcile the rapid advancements in cloud technologies with the five year support cycle of Ubuntu 12.04. LTS versions of Ubuntu get support for the software distributed with it, but don’t usually get new feature additions. As cloud technologies advance, 12.04 users may be left behind. Shuttleworth observed two possible solutions. The first is that folks interested in more closely tracking cloud (or other technology) advances could easily switch to the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu, updated every six months. Another possible solution would be to make available accelerated cloud feature additions to 12.04 users via an optional software repository. There’s some precedent for this within Ubuntu for other fast-moving infrastructure components, so this might well be something to expect with Ubuntu 12.04.

Ubuntu has been a remarkably successful Linux distribution. It started out exclusively as an easy-to-use desktop distribution, but has since added advanced server functionality, pioneering cloud computing integration, and sponsored an awful lot of terrific open source software development. This week’s UDS will likely produce some interesting developments.

Mark Shuttleworth, as Benevolent Dictator For Life of Ubuntu, told me “change is a fact of life, usually for the better.” Keep an eye on Canonical and the Ubuntu community to see how they aim to make Ubuntu better.

Vodafone and Canonical today announced the Vodacom “Webbook”, the fruit of a joint effort to develop a low-cost mobile computing solution for South Africa. Most of the specs are about what you’d expect for such a device, with one extremely interesting twist: it’s powered by a Freescale IMX 51 processor (Cortex A8) CPU in order to lower cost and power consumption. This represents the first mainstream consumer Linux distribution built for the ARM platform.

I spoke with Chris Kenyon, VP of Canonical’s OEM Services Group, about the device. Kenyon’s group of about 130 people work with original equipment manufacturers, like Vodafone, to develop and nurture Ubuntu-powered solutions. For the Webbook, Kenyon told me that Vodafone had a specific product concept in mind and they approached Canonical to help flesh out the details. This included building and rigorously testing a complete Ubuntu 11.10 installation for ARM.

The Ubuntu installation on the Webbook is a pretty standard one: there wasn’t much tweaking required to get it working correctly. The biggest addition Canonical made to the Webbook was to pre-load it with lots of links and content relevant to the local market.

According to Kenyon, emerging markets like South Africa not only represent huge potential sales volumes, but also introduce some interesting technology leaps. For example, wired networking is a rarity, while wireless networking has long been ubiquitous. Similarly, developing markets don’t have nearly the same kinds of legacy software baggage. These factors allow something like the Webbook to have a real chance at success in ways that simply don’t materialize in most of the developed world.

While we sip lattes and gaze at our sundry tablets, much of the rest of the world is still struggling to get access to any computing platform. It might be tempting to dismiss the Webbook in the same way we regularly dismiss netbooks here on TechCrunch, but “clamshell devices will remain a vital part of computing for years to come,” said Kenyon.

From the Vodafone press release: “With the Vodafone Webbook, Vodacom customers will be able to enjoy a portable internet experience with the Ubuntu operating system with various software applications, 24 months warranty and free software updates.”

The Canonical press release notes that Ubuntu is known in “the developing world as a legal, full-featured and flexible technology that offers manufacturers and purchasers a real alternative that embraces an operating system, a compelling application stack and access to the cloud.” The legal aspect is an interesting one to keep in mind.

Ubuntu’s core mission is to make computing available to everyone. As Kenyon observed, this means “more than just software” and the Webbook is just one of many examples of this. Canonical is expecting to ship on more than 10 million devices from name brands like Lenovo, Acer, and others. I expect we’ll see more market-specific devices like the Webbook next year.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has come a long way since it’s first release in 2004. It started out as a nicely packaged Linux desktop, built from a specific set of packages cultivated from the nearly thirty thousand packages available in the Debian distribution. Regular six-month releases ensured that Ubuntu would always be close to the cutting edge of Linux and free software development. Every fourth release is a long-term support offering, which gets security and support updates for three years. In the last seven years Canonical, the primary commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has added a server version of Ubuntu, built UbuntuOne, a cross-platform cloud storage solution, and made great strides in cloud computing.

Hewlett Packard has recently announced that they’ve selected Ubuntu to power the HP Public Cloud; and the Indian Supreme Court has recently switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux; but the bread and butter of Ubuntu development remains their desktop offering. Version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot and officially available on Thursday, October 13, is the latest release from Canonical and packs a number of interesting iterations of their work.

Oneiric Ocelot brings the Ubuntu Software Center forward as a first class citizen in the Ubuntu world. The look and feel of the Software Center has been updated to make it consistent with the overall Ubuntu aesthetic. Also updated is the number and variety of applications available, including commercial applications.

Canonical has been working hard to make publishing houses aware of the Software Center, and they’ve attracted some nice titles. They’re working to build an even more impressive selection of titles, and to make it as easy as possible for users to find the apps they want.

Concurrently, Canonical is courting application developers through their developer.ubuntu.com portal, which explains how to build and submit an application to the Software Center. Canonical reports a 5x increase in application submissions in the three weeks since the developer portal was announced. According to Gerry Carr, Director of Communications at Canonical, they’re now approving at least one app per day.

The motivation behind the developer platform, and the updated Software Center, is to improve the quality of apps available to users. There’s also work to monetize apps to the benefit of the developers through Ubuntu Pay. It remains to be seen just how willing Linux users will be to pay for apps, given the long history of “free as in beer” software. While only a single data point, I think the Humble Bundle offers some valuable insight, and I’d wager that there’s money to be made in the Software Center: the average price spent by Linux users for the Humble Bundle offerings always exceeds that of Windows or Mac users. The current Humble Bundle sees Linux users paying twice as much as the average Windows user.

The last release of Ubuntu, version 11.04, featured the addition of Unity, which was an effort to revitalize desktop Linux for modern hardware while simultaneously development meaningful experiences for touch-based interfaces. It was met with some hostility, as its a marked change from the desktop paradigms to which many users have grown accustomed. Ubuntu 11.10 features some refinements to the overall experience, but it’s clear that Unity is here to stay.

I asked Gerry Carr about the substantial shift in paradigm from the traditional GNOME desktop to Unity’s Dash. Carr agreed that it can be a jarring transition, because it breaks with many of the metaphors we’ve grown up using for what feels like forever, but the ways in which we use computers is changing and the interfaces need to adapt. More and more of our use of computers is to access Internet resources, so the interface should facilitate that in ways that make sense. You should be able to access more than just what’s on your system.

Carr pointed out that the lens mechanism supports heterogenous storage, which means you can keep your data where it makes sense to keep it, but still access it through a consistent, easy-to-use interface. “The Ubuntu experience is as much a rich local experience as it is a cloud experience,” said Carr.

An example of this kind of integration is the Dash itself. When searching for applications, the various lenses will find your currently installed apps as well as suggest apps available for installation. This completely sidesteps the old model of stopping what you’re doing, opening something like the Software Center, searching for an app, and finally installing it. By integrating app search directly into the Dash, Ubuntu provides a single interface to reduce the friction a user experiences.

To be fair, this is still an evolving solution. For people set in their ways, the transition to the Unity experience can be frustrating. I think one of Canonical’s big shortcomings thus far has been a real education effort to explain the value of the lens metaphor, and to help people realize the utility of it.

That complaint aside, Canonical has been working to make lenses that make the Ubuntu experience better. There’s a new Music lens that allows users to search for music. The music lens will search the user’s local music files, as well as query the Ubuntu Music Store, allowing a user to quickly identify which albums might be missing from their local collection and to buy that music quickly and easily. This is a pretty nice convergence of the local+Internet search capabilities of the lens system.

All searches — whether for apps, or files, or media, or whatever — support rich context appropriate filtering. When searching for files, you can filter by file type, size, or last modified date. When searching for media, you can filter by decade or genre. Searching for apps allows you to filter by category or rating. None of this is particularly revolutionary, but the ease with which Ubuntu 11.10 integrates the search and filter functions to the lenses is quite impressive.

Lenses don’t have to come from Canonical, either: there’s a rich API for developing your own lenses. A great example of this is the Ask Ubuntu lens. This integrates a search for the StackExchange-powered AskUbuntu.com site right into your desktop, allowing you to search for answers to problems you might be experiencing. You don’t need to open a browser and navigate to a site: you simply
search using the Unity interface in the same way that you search for new apps to install or new music to listen to.

Another neat addition to Ubuntu 11.10 is Deja Dup, a backup application that works like Apple’s Time Machine. Backups can be stored on your computer’s hard drive, an external hard drive, or to your UbuntuOne account. Storing your backups to your UbuntuOne account allows you to restore your system to different hardware, which is a neat feature. It’s also worth noting that Deja Dup is not a Canonical project: the Deja Dup folks built atop the UbuntuOne API to make this work seamlessly for Ubuntu users.

For anyone that’s used Ubuntu in the past, you may be pleased to learn that 11.10 ditches Evolution in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird as the default mail client. When I asked Carr about the motivation for this shift he immediately responded “user demand”. Clearly users are dissatisfied with Evolution. Carr also noted that more developer effort is being applied to Thunderbird, making it an easy choice for installation.

Ubuntu 11.10 is the last release before the next Long Term Support version, so much of what we’ll be seeing on Thursday is laying the foundation for the what will be in the next version. The great thing about free software like Ubuntu is that you can use version 11.10 right now: simply follow these instructions. Similarly, you can install what will be version 12.04 long before its official release, and you can help shape the direction of that release by filing bug reports!

I’ve been upgrading my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu pretty regularly, and I’ve never really been disappointed. The upgrade to 11.04 was a bit disconcerting at first, but the more I use it the less it bothers me. As Canonical works to improve the lens mechanism of Unity, and as third party lenses proliferate, I expect that I’ll enjoy using 11.10 more.

Canonical, the commercial backer behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, have been hosting a file synchronization service called Ubuntu One for a couple years now. A free account gets you 5GB of storage, and the client side controls have been baked into the last couple of releases of the Ubuntu distribution. It works pretty much like Dropbox or similar services, but has been — until today — Linux-only.

In an announcement late last night, Canonical has revealed that there is now a Windows client for Ubuntu One, allowing you to access all your files from either Linux or Windows computers.

We have long received feedback from Ubuntu users regarding their evolving needs to manage all their content from a single, secure place across multiple platforms and devices. We’ve looked at many use cases, the most common being the Ubuntu user who is using more than one device or OS. Many people have to work in Windows or Mac environments, even if they prefer to use Ubuntu as their home desktop or OS of choice. Another case is enabling more opportunities for sharing across platforms. For example families using different operating systems in one household can use Ubuntu One as their central place to store all their music, documents, photos and share them easily with each other and friends.

Ubuntu One also offers a nifty music streaming service. For $4 per month, you get 20 GB of storage and the ability to stream music files from your account to your mobile device. The Ubuntu One app is available for iOS and Android, and Android devices get the added benefit of a controllable offline cache, allowing you to listen to your cloud-stored music without requiring a network connection. Neat stuff.

Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades.

According to Randal, the future of technological innovation is not stealing limited resources away from one another, but creating new resources — and new opportunities to create new resources — together in a rich ecosystem. The term “ecosystem” came up several times in my chat with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus of IBM Academy of Technology and Dan Frye, Vice President of IBM Open Systems Development. Frye made it clear that IBM’s efforts with Linux are to be a “solutions company” as opposed to a product company. IBM doesn’t make their own Linux distribution, but they work hard to contribute to the kernel and other key open projects that bring value to IBM’s customers.

It’s all about collaboration, and working together with other open source participants. Sometimes this means collaborating with direct competitors, but IBM “gets it” that this collaboration on open source creates new resources for everyone, and they’re not in a cut throat competition for a finite number of customer dollars. Certainly they compete strenuously in a variety of markets, and sometimes they compete strenuously against the companies with whom they’re simultaneously collaborating on open source. But it’s not a zero sum game.

Wladawsky-Berger continued the “solutions company” explanation by pointing out that a skyscraper is never built by a single company. Legions of small companies with specific expertise work together under the guidance of a project manager to coordinate and execute their specific tasks in the right order. This is ultimately how IBM envisions themselves, as a leader in the open source ecosystem working to enable new workloads for their customers.

There are many ways to thrive within the open source ecosystem. Whether its an unwavering dedication to kernel excellence (a la Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman) or a dedication to producing viable, usable tools for everyone to use to avoid reinventing the wheel. The Yocto project is working on this for the embedded space, just as SUSE, under the fresh leadership of Attachmate, is making available their Open Build Service to help people roll packages for multiple distributions. SUSE is also sharing their SUSE Studio to allow ISVs and companies to develop and maintain their own Linux build for use in appliances and “golden master” images. You don’t have to be a SUSE customer to use these tools.

But all of this collaboration doesn’t always happen naturally. Companies are still beholden to shareholders and their bottom line, after all. So sometimes it takes a neutral third party to get the interested parties together, provide neutral ground for discussion and shepherd the communications channels. That’s where the Linux Foundation comes into play. They provide much of the framework and stewardship of the communication between competitors that result in unparalleled technical advancement across so many industries.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” said Allison Randal. Eucalyptus Systems’ Marten Mickos took it one step farther: “Any company with an IT strategy needs an open source strategy.” It’s important to recognize –and embrace! — the larger ecosystem of Linux and open source software, and to find a way to collaborate within it to increase the number of available resources for which to compete.

The value of computer labs should not be underestimated, even for liberal arts students. In addition to hopefully beefy hardware with properly installed and maintained software, there’s a very important social component to using computer labs. This is not to say that’s just an opportunity to watch lulz videos on YouTube with your pals, of course. The people you meet in your classes and your degree program are kindred souls, and you should get to know some of them. Whether it’s a team project, or help with a tough assignment, or simply making smalltalk, the interactions you can have in the computer lab are an important component of the social college experience, and you should not avoid them by locking yourself in your dorm room to plug away on your fancy new workstation.

That janky old laptop you buy from Craigslist will not be as attractive a target for theft as a brand new computer. If it does get stolen, you won’t be out as much cash. No, it won’t be a speed demon, but what do you seriously plan to do with it? Type some papers, read some emails, Facebook, maybe watch some Internet pornography? It’ll sit unobtrusively on your desk, under a pile of papers, until you need it. Even if the battery doesn’t work, you can still lug it with you to plug in at the library or the coffee shop when you need a change of scenery.

You’re not going to play games on your college laptop. Your roommate, or someone in your hall, will have an Xbox 360. Someone else will have a PS3, and there’s a strong chance that there’ll be a Wii somewhere, too. Make friends with these people and play their games. Save yourself the grief of soda spilled into your own precious gaming console. Save yourself the trouble of kicking people out of your room when they want to play RockBand every night during Finals Week. Take the time to learn a couple new card games, too: Euchre, Golf, whatever. Going old school — you know, without electricity — can be a fun and super portable way to enjoy games and meet new people, too.

You’re also not going to use your used laptop as a media PC to stream movies in your room. Oh sure, you can, but you’ll be watching those things alone: none of your friends are going to want to crowd around your 14″ laptop screen to watch anything. For more social viewing opportunities, rely on those friends with XBox 360s and PS3s and big TVs. You can, however, load up your laptop with MP3s so that you can rock out (with headphones on if you have a roommate) while cranking out that paper on Plato’s Republic.

The used laptop you buy from Craigslist should be used to help you get some schoolwork done, and little else. Ubuntu provides everything you need. OpenOffice can open and save files in Microsoft Word format, so you’ll have no real trouble integrating with most of the campus systems. In the event that your school uses a classroom management system like Blackboard or Desire2Learn, you may have the occasional situation that requires some goofy ActiveX control, or proprietary shim component. See the paragraph above about the computer lab.

Ubuntu will keep you safe from the Wild West that is a dorm network. You can be absolutely sure that a good many of the computers on the dorm network are compromised by malware. There’s also a slim chance that some miscreant in your building fancies himself a hax0r, and will probe and poke at every device he or she can find. Your Ubuntu laptop will not easily become a victim, and it might even become a conversation starter.

1. Download the latest version of Ubuntu and burn it to a CD.
2. Search Craigslist for a decent, moderately priced used laptop.
3. Buy that laptop.
4. Boot that laptop from your Ubuntu CD and follow the instructions.
5. Enjoy your college experience.

The multitouch stuff in Ubuntu is interesting in its own right, since they’re developing a whole “touch language” that will allow for chaining touch sequences into sentences of complex actions. I’m actually quite excited to see how this develops, especially since the multitouch libraries are hosted on Launchpad for public consumption and participation. More on this below.

Before reading my thoughts on the matter, take a look at this opinion piece over at Shanzai.com: Could Ubuntu make the x86 tablet more attractive?. It’s an interesting, if somewhat myopic, look at the question.

My opinion: I don’t think Ubuntu is a good fit for tablets. I’m generally a big proponent of the “small pieces, loosely joined” mentality behind much of the Linux desktop; but I think it creates way too much complexity on a tablet form factor. The X window system alone, I think, is too much for a tablet, and then Ubuntu is going to heap on D-BUS messaging and the various GNOME pieces and parts, and before long the tablet is too complex for its own good. You don’t need a multiuser operating system running on a tablet.

I’m a huge Linux and Free Software advocate, and I do want to see it succeed in a general sense in the tablet market. I think that Android is the best bet to make that happen. People see “Apple iOS” marketed on iPhones and iPads, and most people have at least passing familiarity with an iPhone, so they think to themselves “Oh, the iPad is like a gigantic iPhone. I can handle that.” People see the word Ubuntu and either say “What’s that?” or they say “Oh yeah, I remember when Wal-Mart was pushing those crappy $200 desktop PCs with Ubuntu.” Either way, they have a strong negative reaction.

But say “Look at this Android tablet!” and people will say “Android? Like on those Motorola phones?” Their interest will be piqued. They’ll know that there are a plethora of apps available. In short, they’ll have a more positive reaction, and will see the tablet for what it can be.

As for the advancements of Canonical’s multitouch libraries, I don’t know that complex “touch sentences” make a lot of sense — yet — on a tablet. I can see such interactions having tremendous utility on a desktop or laptop, where you’re doing complex things with files. But since the entire metaphor of “file management” is so abstracted on tablets, by necessity, I don’t think there will be much real need for anything beyond the few “magic gestures” standardized by Apple. The range of things you can do on a tablet is a small subset of the range of things you can do on a desktop.

I’m eager to see Android mature, and for third-party application developers to really push the envelope of what the tablet form factor makes convenient. I’m hopeful that real competition can drive advancement, thereby making all consumers winners. I continue to advocate for Free Software solutions on all of the computing platforms I use. But just like I don’t use Ubuntu on a compute cluster for research purposes, I don’t expect to use Ubuntu on a tablet. Pick the right platform for the hardware and the job.

Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe.

What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox. No one would be inaccurate in calling Firefox a bit of a memory hog at times. I wouldn’t touch a netbook with a 10-foot pole—netbooks may also be dying, so this may all be moot sooner rather than later—so I have no idea if that’s true or not, that Chrome or Chromium out-performs Firefox on netbooks. I have no horse in that race, as it were.

Yet there’s confusion as to whether Ubuntu would use Chrome or Chromium. You normally want your free and open-source (FOSS) operating systems to come with FOSS software, something that Chrome is not.

Wikipedia explains the difference between Chrome and Chromium:

Chromium is the name given to the open source project and the browser source code released and maintained by the Chromium Project. It is possible to install the latest snapshots for Windows or download the source code and build it in Windows, Linux or Mac. Google takes this source code and adds on the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate, an opt-in option for users to send Google their usage statistics and crash reports as well as RLZ-tracking which transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded.

Sounds to me like you’d want to install Chromium and not Chrome—who wants all that extra Google junk?—but that’s just me. But considering that Ubuntu already ships with proprietary software (Flash, certain drivers, etc.) I don’t know if the Chrome/Chromium split will be any sort of issue for Canonical.

Where this leaves Firefox is anyone’s guess. I mean, it could be that this was just a juicy rumor for a lazy Friday afternoon and nothing more, in which case I would have just wasted several minutes of your time.

Or, it could be a sign that people are starting to feel less, um, “loyalty” to Firefox. Who knows?

A very dedicated coder took the time to get a full desktop OS onto this device. It obviously won’t have much functionality, but its potential is only limited by your free time.

You can find all necessary download and mirror links at the XDA developers site.

[XDA Developers] via [Engadget]

In Japan, Sharp has been known for their ultra-mobile Zaurus for quite a while now, and today, the company added a new mini device to its line-up of mini laptops, the PC-Z1 [press release in English]. Marketed as a “Mobile Internet Tool”, the PC-Z1 comes with a tiny 5-inch TFT LCD (a touchscreen) and measures just 161.4 x 108.7 x 19.7 ~ 24.8mm (weight: 409g).

The touchscreen offers WSVGA (1024×600) resolution. Sharp threw in a 800MHz Freescale i.MX515 CPU, 512MB RAM (fixed), 4GB flash storage, microSDHC support for up to 16GB, 802.11b/g WiFi, Flash Lite support, Open Office, a QWERTY keyboard and somehow managed to squeeze in two USB ports. The battery lifespan for the Ubuntu-powered device is 10 hours. There is also a “quick launch” function, which makes the device boot in three seconds.

Sharp says the device is targeted as users who look for a device that rolls Internet access, an electronic dictionary and an e-Book function into one. The PC-Z1 goes on sale in Japan on September 25 for $450 (in white and black). Sharp hasn’t said anything about international sales plans yet.

Prices range from thirteen bucks for a one gigger up to $44 for a 16 GB stick. Not too shabby. And by purchasing these USB drives, you’re also helping the world: “Active Media Products donates 5% of the retail price of the Penguin USB drive to World Wildlife Fund, with a minimum annual contribution of $25,000.”

Dell offers Ubuntu 8.04 on the systems it sells. That version is now a year old, and two subsequent releases have hit the streets, each offering significant improvements in terms of system updates. Important security fixes are released for the older 8.04 version, but new features and system updates are not.

The gang at BetaNews got ahold of a Dell spokesperson for some info on this:

“We are trying to stay on a 12-month cadence to keep costs down, and build a stable platform,” a Dell spokesperson said in an e-mail to Betanews late last night. “A mainstream user does not care if it’s [Ubuntu Linux] 8.04 or 8.10 or 9.04 (he/she does not know what those are) — she just wants it to work right and be stable/safe…Most of the Linux enthusiasts would not like to be so far behind (i.e., 8.04 vs. 9.04), but they are not our primary target audience for the [operating system] image.”

Dell’s doing the right thing: they’re focusing on giving a rock-solid system to the average consumer. Dell gets to minimize the changes between systems, which will reduce their support costs, and users get a system that’s well supported.

It’s a fine line to walk, though, because the newer versions of Ubuntu offer some strong incentives to upgrade. I’ve experienced substantially better startup and shutdown times with Ubuntu 9.04. Newer version of Firefox, OpenOffice, and other applications also mean enhanced functionality.

Dell goes a lot farther than they need to with the way they support Ubuntu:

“In addition to 8.04, we chose to control our updates (via our own update repository — similar to MS update). We go the extra mile in double qualifying all updates (that one would see in stock 8.10 and 9.04) and only publish those that are rock-stable. We will [put in] select features over the course of the year that make sense for the product, like wireless improvements,” according to Dell spokespersons.

By having a Dell-specific repository for software updates, they’re making themselves a one-stop shop for all things Ubuntu on their hardware. The folks who want to explore the wealth of additional free software available to Ubuntu users can add additional repositories, but the average user just looking for a reliable, supported system should be extremely well served by Dell’s repository, and the work they do to make the packages secure and stable.

We talk a lot about “Linux on the Desktop”, and we have no shortage of opinions and ideas on how that’s coming along, and how to make it better. I think Dell’s a good example of how to make Linux on the desktop a success, and I’m looking forward to their continued support.

Day Three of Optimum Online Ultra. We discussed it at some length during yesterday’s podcast, which, need I remind you, ended in an explosion. You never know what’s gonna happen here at CrunchGear! Anyway, today I present a cruddy video showing how long it takes to download a Linux ISO—Ubuntu, from this mirror—because it seems like the cool thing to do.

Now, I can’t vouch for the quality of YouTube, but I can assure you that the download hovered right around 9MB/s for the duration. Now, that’s a 700MB file, and it took as long as it took.

The bottom line here is, yes, Optimum Online Ultra is fast.

Any other requests?

Microsoft has been pushing Windows on low-end PC makers by giving away XP licenses, but once 7 comes out that will seem a little ridiculous, especially considering how well 7 is likely to work with the light hardware. So later in 2009 there will actually be a value proposition in choosing Ubuntu to power a line of netbooks — at the moment XP is simply more recognizable and better-supported, and doesn’t cost much either.

But Shuttleworth had more than shop talk for 7:

They’ve put concerted attention on the user experience with the shell. I think it’s going to be a great product, and every indication is we will see it in the market sooner rather than later.

It’s like a whale praising a harpoon!

I’ve been fawning over this little netbook since last week and I can’t wait to get one, but I’ll have to wait until January for the MIE version. Hopefully I’ll get it in time for CES because lugging this 15-inch MacBook Pro is getting old. Spec-wise it isn’t very powerful, but it isn’t meant to be a desktop replacement either. The UI on the MIE version is very intuitive and runs a gaggle of Open Office applications. There’s a repository of applications and programs that can be added to the MIE Mini 1000, but we didn’t have any Internet access, so I wasn’t able to see what I could or couldn’t install. There is some regulation on what programs can be installed and they have to be in the HP MIE repository, but I’m sure you can “hack” it to run whatever you want. I could be wrong, though. All I know is that I want it and so long as it has an RSS reader then I’m good to go.

Dearest social butterfly,

Dell wants you to know that is has just the netbook for you, the Inspiron Mini 9. The default operating system is Ubuntu, with some sort of customized Dell interface. Other than that, it’s a netbook. You know what that means.

The base price is a more-than-reasonable $350, and for that you get a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB solid state drive, and built-in Wi-Fi. The display doesn’t look too bad, either, coming in at 8.9 inches. You really would have to see the diaply in person to make a proper judgment call, though.

And if Linux isn’t your thing, you can always upgrade to Windows XP. You might want to up the RAM if you’re headed in that direction.

Would you hate me if I admit that it actually doesn’t look half-bad?

Well I’ll be—the Dell Mini-Inspiron doesn’t look half bad. Gizmodo broke into Dell headquarters, beat up the security guard, and stole the full spec sheet for the Internet’s enjoyment. That, or some dude just e-mailed a copy to Rothman. Either way, the specs are now out there.

The raw: 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of RAM, a solid state drive (4 to 16GB), 8.9-inch display with a 1024×600 resolution, Wi-Fi and three USB ports.

A four cell battery rounds out the package.

The best part? It comes with an Ubunutu configuration. Set up a lightweight window manager and you could have yourself a fine “I’m going to Starbucks, might as well surf the Web while I’m there” computer. Might be handy when covering trade shows, too.

Nobody would argue that Linux has an appreciable market share. They could however say that they have an appreciating share. Cause in fact they do. Since Microsoft launched Vista in January 2007, U.K. preinstalls of Linux have multiplied 28 times.

But unfortunately for Linux, 28 times a little is still a little. However, consider that pre-Vista, Linux was being shipped on only .1% of PC’s. That’s nothing, but 2.8% is definitely something. Something from nothing cannot be ignored. Remember it was not too long ago Apple had a market share of nothing…

All this probably goes more to show that customers are not embracing Vista, and are instead searching for alternative options. According to market research firm, Context, 93% of PC’s still ship with Vista. But the newest evolution of Linux, Ubuntu seems to be making strides in the right direction.