Ubuntu Archive

"Canonical is indeed bringing a TV to CES. But it's not about hardware just yet: Ubuntu TV is a brand new derivitave of Ubuntu, with a full-in TV-optimized UI inspired by Unity, and full-on media center and DVR features. There's a movie, TV and music store, a YouTube app, and of course it's all optimized for a lean-back remote experience. The software will be free for manufacturers to package with their TVs, and Ubuntu says there will be TVs on shelves by the end of the year."

Ah, it's that time of the year again. We already had this up on the sidebar, but I figured we'd turn it into a proper front page item - mostly because I want to discuss the move by the Ubuntu team to no longer install GNOME 2 as the 'classic' desktop option - which pretty much ends any and all involvement for me with Ubuntu (KDE 4 here I come). There's more to this than just that, of course, so those of you who do like Unity still have enough reason to upgrade.

Netbook innovator Asustek has announced that it will ship three models of its Eee PC with Ubuntu 10.10 preinstalled. Canonical announced Asus' decision to load the Eee PC 1001PXD, 1011PX and 1015PX with Ubuntu 10.10 from 1 June as one that will "make it one of the most user-friendly PCs on the market". Asus said that "many more" Eee PC models running Ubuntu will be available later this year. Linux fans will hope that in the three years since Asus started shipping Linux on its Eee PCs users will have realised that Linux is far more lightweight and suited to netbook computing than Windows.

Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu Linux, estimates that the product has over 12 million users worldwide. And why not? Ubuntu is free and it runs more than ten thousand applications. It has a vibrant user community, websites covering everything you might ever need to know, good tutorials, a paid support option, and more. Yet I often hear friends and co-workers casually criticize Ubuntu. Perhaps this the price of success. Or is it? In this article I'll analyze common criticisms and try to sort fact from fiction.

Ubuntu has released the first beta for Ubuntu 11.04. This si the first release where Unity is the default desktop environment. All the official Ubuntu derivatives have also bee beta'd.

"One of the benefits of the direction that's been taken with the next release of Ubuntu is that there is no longer a need for a separate netbook edition. The introduction of the new shell for Ubuntu means that we have a user interface that works equally well whatever the form factor of the PC. And the underlying technology works on a range of architectures including those common in netbook, notebooks, desktops or whatever you choose to run it on. Hence the need for a separate version for netbooks is removed"

"The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what should be done with Banshee's Amazon Store revenue stream, while it was finally resolved, was not Ubuntu's most shining moment. At the matter's conclusion, Banshee developers were not happy with the results. This is not how open-source communities should work together and no one knows that better than Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, who wrote, "We made some mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share with the Banshee team.""

Ubuntu Linux has millions of fans. What's not to like? A free operating system with ten thousand free applications, websites covering everything you might ever want to know, tutorials, active forums, and more. Yet for all these benefits, situations pop up when you want a faster, lighter operating system. Perhaps you have an older computer, or maybe a netbook or a mobile device. Wouldn't it be great to have a lightweight Ubuntu? That day has finally arrived. Lubuntu offers a way to stay in the Ubuntu family -- with a product that performs better and uses fewer resources.

Dell has released two servers for the U.S. market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an implementation of the Eucalyptus private cloud software that runs on the Ubuntu Server Edition operating system.

"The Ubuntu developers met last week in Dallas to make final design decisions about the popular Linux distribution's features and decided to use LibreOffice for its office suite."

De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues sees 2010 as a watershed year for Ubuntu, one that could herald meaningful enterprise interest in the OS, thanks to a rising tide of developers - and deployment servers - adopting the OS. "As with many recent trends in the IT industry, developers become ambassadors for products they enjoy using and have quickly become an early indicator for enterprise technology usage in the future. In a seemingly perfect storm, Ubuntu is benefiting from strong developer usage, and the fact that developers are increasingly selecting Amazon's EC2 cloud platform bodes well for continued Ubuntu success on EC2," Rodrigues writes, noting that Ubuntu has surpassed Red Hat usage on deployment servers as well. "As that occurs, IT decision makers will need to consider or reconsider Ubuntu for usage within the enterprise. Rest assured that Red Hat won't sit idly by during these discussions."

After announcing the move to Unity, and the eventual move to Wayland further down the line (someday one day perhaps eventually maybe once when unicorns roam the earth), Ubuntu is announcing yet another major change, this time in its release policy. While they're not moving to a rolling release as some websites are claiming, they will update components and applications more often.

Finally. Finally the leader of a major distribution who has the guts to stand up and say what a lot of people have known for a long time, but didn't dare to say because it usually leads to a storm of criticism. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will be moving away from X.org, opting to go with Wayland instead.