Submitted by The Ubuntu team is happy to announce the first release of Ubuntu JeOS, Ubuntu JeOS 7.10. Pronounced “juice”, Ubuntu JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) is an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances.
Ubuntu Jeos (Just Enough Operating System) Released
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i take it that this is supposed to go inside a virtual machine running on top a hypervisor, and is basically a bare bones os that one can put ones application(s) into is such a way that the user may never see the os at all when starting the session.
if so, could one in theory have the session be frozen, moved to a different physical machine, and then resumed there?
sounds interesting for transfering something one is working on on the laptop, onto a stronger desktop, without having to mess around with things like syncronisation.
hmm, i wonder how this will work out compared to say using hibernation on a laptop. and that reminds me, i should look into how that linux kexec hibernation project is going.
Just to keep track…How many Ubuntu-based distros are there at this point?
Forty-two is the answer. B^)
They are all Ubuntu … they all use the same repositories, the same libraries.
Unlike the case with Windows DRM, or Windows WGA, or WMP, or IE, if there are parts of Ubuntu that you do not like or need, you have the option to simply take it out. Hence … suitable for a given (and clearly stated) purpose … you have JeOS.
If you have a different purpose in mind … then choose another flavour of Ubuntu.
There are now 6 official Ubuntu variants.
Windows: 14 variants (taking server and desktop editions)
many of which are unclear why they are seperate variants…
Also, ubuntu/canonical seem to treat kubuntu/xubuntu as more of hobbyist platforms, so its hardly even 6 for ubuntu.
No. It’s a bare bones system that actually holds the virtual machine.
thanks. i was starting to become a bit confused as to its actual function.
A bunch of folks on this thread seem to be confused already, so maybe I can clear things up…
JeOS is NOT a virtualization platform. It’s NOT a hypervisor. It’s NOT a host OS. It’s NOT a general-purpose virtual client or server. It’s NOT, in its own right, any of the migration or hibernation ideas articulated in the last three paragraphs of the parent comment.
JeOS is a make-your-own virtual appliance platform. It’s the runtime environment that connects the application payload to the underlying hardware virtualization platform. It’s a development target for ISVs that want to ship their product as a VMware disk image instead of (or as well) as an OS-dependent application package.
The most comparable existing product to JeOS is rBuilder from rPath Linux. Functionally, the “out-of-the-box” experience of JeOS is close to a Gentoo Stage 3 without the plethora of build tools. It boots to a text console and provides the basic CLI tools for system and package management.
The ISV packages their application for the appropriate Ubuntu release and installs it, along with its dependencies, on a fresh JeOS system. Poke the configuration here and there, and bake it into a disk image. Now they may ship their application as a package for Ubuntu or as a disk image for VMware, nearly eliminating the issue of cross-platform compatibility.
Yes, it has a name, and therefore the name sucks. Yes, it’s yet another version of Ubuntu, and therefore it’s obviously unnecessary. If it had a theme, I’m sure it would be absolutely hideous. There, now we move past the standard-issue knee-jerk criticisms and maybe consider the rationale, prospects, and implications of this product. Okay?
Edited 2007-11-19 18:28
Why can’t this be used as both a guest VM and as a host for VMWare Server? What difference does it make? True, it is not an ESX replacement, but for those looking to run the free VMWare Server on a minimal host, this would work quite well.
I still don’t get it … You say it’s not a host? Well, so then it’s a guest – of what? Gentoo Stage 3 means building a complete operating system – I’m sure that’s not what JeOS is. I always thought of it as a slimmed down version of Ubuntu that actually _holds_ the virtualization. Wrong?
Are we at the “Just Enough Operating Systems” point yet?
We’re on a site all about operating systems… OSNews… and people complain that we have too many operating systems (which is supposed to be what people on this site have interest in).
Perhaps I’m the confused one.
Clever that, well done!
This could be nice for older machines as well provided that they don’t strip out anything vital.
Is this simply the base system of 7.10?
Where to get it ?
Link was provided in the article.
Sorry. I was very tired and somehow my eyes passed over the link in the announcement.
By the way – since we have two new “official derivatives” of Ubuntu (Gobuntu and Jeos) I think that “Ubuntu Team” should consider some form of REALLY lightweight and less resource-consuming Ubuntu version. I have spare, fully operational Pentium 166 system with only 64 mb of memory, and Virge DX 4MB pci card.
Such system is not enough for Xubuntu, but still could be usable with something similar to “Ubuntulite”, “Fluxbuntu” or “Elbuntu” but those projects are not too advanced in development process to be usable.
I think there are still many old but operational boxes in many places in the world, and we need something comparable to Windows 9x/NT4/Fundamentals to revive them. FreeDOS is good, but I am talking about Pentium-based system after all
Syllable would run on that hardware. Just: the memory might be a bit of squeeze.
I doubt Ubuntu would be able to slim down enough to do it: something like DSL would work I guess.
Have you tried Puppy Linux?
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
It was designed for older systems and is very versatile. If you boot it from CD or USB flash it can even run on a system with no hard drive!
We have hard time pronouncing Ubuntu’s weird edition names anyway, so no surprise here, but I still find this jeos=juice somewhat disturbing. Anyway, in what regard is this different than a debian base install with vmware on top of it ? The announcement isn’t really informative, and the image has just downloaded but I won’t have time to try it today.
Now we have Ubuntu Jeos (pronounced Juice) for virtual hosts and Motorola’s Juix (pronounced, as far as I can tell, Juice) platform for mobile phones.
It must be popular!
For those a bit in the dark, Ubuntu is putting this out for people who want a small footprint and performance optimized based to act as the host for virtual servers and software. For software like VMware Server, Xen, OpenVZ the first thing most admins have to do is disable all the unnecessary services and anything causing overhead. On virtual systems, all you really need is SSH and maybe nfs, everything else can be shutdown.
JEOS eliminates the need to do that tweaking because it’s already stripped down to just the bare essentials. Think of it as a gentoo stage3 install, just enough to get the system up and running.
It SHOULD be very similar to running a debian base install, but I will assume they have made some performance modification, as well as, included the necessary bits for thinks like Xen to work properly, or at least gracefully.
Sweet. I hope this can be a good Xen host for an Intel Mac, hosting MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
Looks like JeOS is trying to be/wants to be an OSS replacement for VMWare ESX. Could possibly get there eventually if the requisite VM management tools can be built to work with JeOS.
Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Gnubuntu….. JeOS.
As I read the press release, it sound like this is a minimal OS install aimed at being a guest. Kernel support for things that don’t matter (like say, sound or USB) are taken out so the guest is ‘lean and mean’. Other posters are talking like it’s the ESX host portion, which isn’t what it looked like to me.
Update: Butters’ post sums up what I took from the press release.
Edited 2007-11-19 18:38
Perhaps this release marks “Just Enough Ubuntu” pronounced (jew). How many releases does Canonical expect to release in the future? As small as they are, they should focus on what they are doing now and make their core distro even better.
At 151MB for the JEOS iso, this is a longshot compared to rpath for the same thing. For appliance / virtualization things, conary beats pretty much anything out there (said from an Ubuntu fanboi sitting on his composited Gutsy desktop).
http://www.rpath.com/corp/products-rbuilder.html
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/jeos/releases/gutsy/release/
[user@localhost user]$
No, the latest PuppyLinux (3.01) requires 128 MB RAM, last I heard. Yes, the last DamnSmallLinux I tried (3.4.1 ?) would work with 64 MB. Slackware with a decent swap partition would probably work too. But FYI, beyond that, I dunno what you expect a P166 to do (coding, web browsing, music, games, multitasking?). And yes, FreeDOS is extremely lightweight in comparison, but if FreeDOS doesn’t take advantage of your Pentium, get DJGPP and OpenWatcom and recompile some stuff. I don’t find a P166 overkill for DOS (and don’t miss Win95), it’s “just right” (see my webpage). :o)
So this means that all other variant of Ubuntu are inefficient.
Shouldn’t it install on a PC? I guess not, because it didn’t even boot on my PC …
The image posted is bad, because I tried to install it in VMWare Workstation 6, and it did not work. Comes back as bad media.