Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to cloud computing.
Canonical and Ubuntu made a big splash early on by intensely focusing on a usable Linux desktop experience. They pared down the dizzying number of packages available in Debian and selected a few best-of-breeds applications to install by default. The installation process was streamlined to be as easy and as intuitive as possible. Ubuntu was a huge success and quickly gained a passionate following. → Read More
Canonical, the corporate sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has been doing a lot of interesting development work across a number of different computing segments: their on-going work with the Unity interface for Ubuntu, Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android, and a whole lot more. Ubuntu, according to Canonical, is the world’s most popular OS for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Not content with being a tenant, Canonical is pushing to make Ubuntu the number one OS for running clouds, too. Similarly uncontent with existing descriptors like Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas), Canonical is announcing their own Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS).
When I first heard the term “Metal as a Service”, I admit that I immediately envisioned Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon distributing heavy metal free software songs. MaaS is, in fact, a new server orchestration solution cooked up by Canonical. → Read More
Canonical’s Ubuntu TV, unveiled earlier this year, was the first in a series of announcements about “Ubuntu on devices”. The next device in Canonical’s multi-screen strategy for world domination is being unveiled next week at Mobile World Congress 2012, and it’s an Android-powered smartphone. It’s not entirely what you might think, though.
This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android. Nor is it an all-Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android is the full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on a shared kernel that provides context appropriate access to all your content. When out and about, the phone operates as any other Android-powered phone; but when you slip the device into a dock connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse you get the familiar Ubuntu desktop experience. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
Vodaphone 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. → Read More
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. → Read 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. → Read More
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. → Read More
Heading off to college? Here’s my suggestion: buy a used laptop from Craigslist and install Ubuntu onto it. Seriously. You don’t need a new computer for college. If you’re pursuing a liberal arts degree, you really don’t need a brand new computer just to write all the papers you’ll write. If you’re pursuing an engineering degree, the chances are high that your department’s computer labs are better than anything you can buy for yourself. → Read More
The iPod revolutionized the portable media player market. The iPhone shook up the smart phone market. The iPad is setting the standard for the revived tablet market. What is it about Apple that makes these products so great? In part it’s Apple’s dedication to user experience; but I’d argue that the larger factor in their success is Apple’s end-to-end control of the product. They make the hardware and the operating systems, and build the two to work in near-perfect synchronicity. A lot of CrunchGear commenters say they’re really waiting for a Windows 7 tablet to compete with the iPad, but I say they’ll be waiting for a long, long time: Windows 7 on the multitude of tablet hardware options will be just like Windows 7 on desktop PCs: an appeal to the lowest common denominator, thereby hobbling both hardware and OS advances. (And I actually like Windows 7, so belay the Apple fanboy comments for a moment.) But what about an Ubuntu tablet? The svelt, modular Linux kernel has breathed new life into many aging PCs, and Canonical has been working on a netbook-specific interface for Ubuntu for some time. They have multitouch support, now, too, so couldn’t they pretty quickly roll out a wonderful Ubuntu-powered tablet? → Read More
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. → Read More
Oh my god, are you serious? Are these guys serious!? They ported Ubuntu 8.04 to the X1 ARE THEY SERIOUS?!? → Read More
Looking at the Twitter stream of Day 2 at FOWA 2009, it’s clear that Canonical’s Simon Wardley hit all the right buttons with his levelheaded and wryly humourous take on the ongoing evolution of cloud computing, and what it means for the future of innovation in the tech space. He gave a tip of the hat to Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud, which supports the emerging EC2 standard, and finished on the sombre reminder: “Either the cloud is based on open source or you’ll risk losing internet freedoms.” → Read More
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). → Read More
As a Linux user, I’m tickled to see these new USB drives in the shape of an Emperor penguin. Not only are they super cute, they come pre-loaded with a bootable instance of Ubuntu 9.04! And if for some reason you don’t like penguins, you can get some visceral pleasure by pretending to rip off the li’l bugger’s head in order to access the USB jack inside. → Read More
One of the complaints lodged against Linux systems is that they update too frequently. Die-hard Linux users compulsively update their systems, always running the latest bleeding edge version of the kernel or various applications. At least, that’s the impression that many non-Linux users have about die-hard Linux users. Dell, who have been offering Linux on some laptops for two years now, have recently made it known that they won’t be updating to the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu any time soon. → Read More
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. → Read More
Oh Windows 7, is there anyone who doesn’t like you, other than John Biggs? In an interview, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and head MF in charge of popular Linux distro Ubuntu, had many nice things to say about the newest OS on the block. He says it’ll bring a new kind of competition to the table. → Read More
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