There are many new features including some new interface customizations which allow you to customize your experience. The release seems more stable that Gutsy Gibbon but that could just be my hardware.
I've been a proponent of the Linux desktop for five or so years and the thing that continues to stifle adoption is the lack of drivers from some major hardware vendors (which seems to … Read more
More good stuff from The VAR Guy today, this time on the likelihood that virtualization is starting to harm server sales:
Each time The VAR Guy speaks with a CIO or solutions provider, he hears about yet another server consolidation project. Through virtualization and more effective storage management, companies can simplify their data centers while raising server utilization rates....The VAR Guy doesn't think the economy is destroying server sales. Rather, businesses are becoming far more efficient at leveraging the servers they already have.This is difficult for an established server vendor to accept, but I suspect it's an opportunity for any new entrant to the market. On the Linux side, this includes both Novell and Ubuntu. Yes, Novell has been around for a long time, but its server sales are still nascent. As for Ubuntu, its primary task is to take a stick to the incumbents. Incorporating virtualization into its business model may help.… Read more
The VAR Guy has a great post explicating why Ubuntu's time has come. I was going to write "finally come" but Ubuntu has never demonstrated anything less than continued momentum. It has always grown, expanded, and become more interesting to enterprises.
But now, as Monsieur Le VAR suggests, the stars may have aligned to take Ubuntu into the enterprise big time. How will it find room in an already crowded Linux market?
Both [Red Hat and Novell] bet heavily on the server. Red Hat completely ignored the desktop for years. Novell had some success on corporate desktops, but continues to ignore consumer systems.
As Microsoft stumble on the desktop, Canonical was the rare Linux company that actually stepped forward and pursued a consumer-centric design that even The VAR Guy's young kids quickly mastered in a few hours.
Simplicity, thy name is Ubuntu, as my grandma will tell you. But this isn't necessarily about the desktop.… Read more
I've written about Launchpad, Ubuntu's software hosting and development website that enables collaboration across multiple projects, but I'm even more excited now that Mark Shuttleworth is strongly considering releasing it under the AGPL (Affero GPL). Launchpad is very cool. Keeping it open in a networked world makes it even cooler.
The choice of AGPL - which specifically covers software offered as a networked service - would be appropriate for Launchpad. It would also add some much-needed credibility to AGPL, which has come in for criticism from Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager. DiBona has said … Read moreThe Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.
To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").
It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.
So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.
The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.… Read more
With its scheduled April 24 release of Ubuntu 8.04, which also goes by the alliterative moniker "Hardy Heron," Canonical will ship its second "long term support" (LTS) version. But the first, really, since the company and distribution became widely popular.
There's always been a bit of a flavor-of-the-month aspect to Linux distributions other than the big two: Red Hat (along with its Fedora community version) and Novell's SUSE. Gentoo grabbed headlines one year; Mandrake was supposed to make the Linux desktop a widespread reality another year. It might be tempting to paint Ubuntu'… Read more
Correction 8 p.m. PT: I included the wrong duration for regular Ubuntu releases. It's 18 months.
Canonical plans to release Hardy Heron, its newest version of Ubuntu Linux on Thursday, and Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth isn't being shy and retiring about it.
"This is our most significant release ever," he said in an interview.
Ordinarily I avoid publishing such marketing superlatives, but Shuttleworth is right. Hardy Heron, also called version 8.04 for its April 2008 launch date, is Canonical's proof-in-the-pudding moment that will show whether the company can grow beyond its subsidized roots … Read more
It occurred to me today that open-source infrastructure providers (e.g., commercial providers of open-source operating systems, databases, application servers, etc.) may have much in common with telecommunications infrastructure providers (like cable, wireless, etc. providers).
Everyone uses their stuff, and generally at a rate that doesn't quite match the value of the benefits derived from it.
Early on we pay a premium for broadband Internet or support for still-buggy but cheaper open-source software. Over time it becomes commodified and our willingness to pay decreases.
What's a company to do?… Read more
Red Hat has been suggesting for years that it isn't interested in the traditional consumer desktop as a business, but it has finally come out and said it in concrete terms:
[W]e have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.That's OK, presumably, because there isn't a market for it today, anyway, as Novell's Ron Hovsepian recently noted. Hence, Novell is focusing its desktop efforts on the enterprise.… Read more
This year my one-and-only New Year's resolution was to begin the transition to open-source software in general and Linux in particular. I thought I was just setting out to learn a new operating system. In fact, I was entering an entirely new world of computing.
My Linux education began with a lesson in community. I struggled to get Ubuntu, my distribution (or "distro") of choice, to recognize either of my two wireless adapters. One of many comments to the blog post in which I described my wireless woes pointed me to a program that got me connected … Read more
Internet & Media
Internet & Media
The Audiophiliac
1kFacebook Likes
663Tweets
159Google Plus Shares
184Comments
Take the best in technology for a spin with Brian Cooley.
