Links: Ubuntu/Canonical in January 2014
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-15 16:16:17 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-15 16:16:17 UTC
Summary: News from the past couple of weeks, touching on the different parts or projects at Canonical
Server
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At November's OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, members of the OpenStack Foundation made clear that many IT departments are either already experimenting with the open cloud computing platform, or will do so this year. The foundation's OpenStack Survey involved 387 OpenStack cloud deployments across 56 countries, and determined that OpenStack is very high on the list of technologies to work with at enterprises in 2014.
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Ubuntu Server 14.04 is set to include Nginx Web server as standard, along with the old favorite Apache
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The next version of Ubuntu Server is expected to include Nginx in the main archive, meaning it will "sit alongside Apache in 14.04 with full security updates over the life of the release," Canonical employee Jorge Castro wrote today.
Financials
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The financial result for the Ubuntu maker is out. The company posted a loss of $21.3 million in fiscal year 2013, a straight fall of $10.2 million from the loss posted in fiscal year 2012, which was $11.1 million. The revenue earned in 2013 however, was $65.7 million, up from $56.8 million reported a year earlier.
Desktop/Tablets/Other
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A few days before the announcement for the end of life of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), Canonical has released the last major update of its soon to be unsupported Ubuntu operating system, fixing no more than nine vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream kernel packages.
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The UK government now says that Ubuntu 12.04 is the safest operating system available, way ahead of Windows 8 and Mac OS X.
The Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) is the UK National Technical Authority for information assurance and they've done a series of tests to find out what is the most secure operating system available for the governmental apparatus.
The security assessment made by CESG included the following categories: VPN, Disk Encryption, Authentication, Secure Boot, Platform Integrity and Application Sandboxing, Application Whitelisting, Malicious Code Detection and Prevention, Security Policy Enforcement, External Interface Protection, Device Update Policy, Event Collection for Enterprise Analysis, and Incident Response.
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Tech Republic has five reasons why an Ubuntu tablet could do quite well in 2014.
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You won't see an Ubuntu Edge at CES this week. Ubuntu's parent company, Canonical, raised $12.8-million on Indiegogo to develop and build this Ubuntu Linux/Android-powered Ubuntu Edge combination smartphone and PC, but it still fell far short of its $32 million goal. So what?
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In an interview with PCpro that it was revealed by Mark Shuttleworth that Canonical is now leading the race for full convergence across all devices and architectures. There is also a possibility of shifting over from bi-annual releases to semi-rolling releases as mobile users are accustomed to updates being released ‘whenever’ they’re ready by the maintainers.
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Canonical has confirmed that the next point release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will be available on February 6.
The company has postponed by two weeks the release of the fourth maintenance build, but now the release date has been confirmed and set in stone.
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Ubuntu is the "Marmite" operating system within the Linux community. You either love it or hate it.
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Adam Conrad has announced earlier today, January 7, that the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux operating system, also known as Raring Ringtail among its fans, will reach end of life (EOL) on Monday, January 27, 2014, as Canonical will no longer provide security/critical fixes and software updates for it.
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Torrent search would be added to Ubuntu's Dash, a central tool that lets users search files and applications on their desktop as well as online sources like Amazon or Wikipedia. The search tool prototype uses the Pirate Bay as a data source. It may be modified to filter out pirated content, but users can change the filters to suit their desires. It's also possible that a future version could use a different data source.
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2013 was a phenomenal year for Ubuntu. It is difficult to believe that it was just a year ago today that we announced Ubuntu for phones. Since then we have built and released the first version of Ubuntu for phones complete with core apps, delivered Mir in production on the phone, built a vastly simplified and more powerful new app delivery platform complete with full security sand-boxing, created a powerful smart scopes service to bring the power of native search and online content to devices, delivered a new SDK with support for QML, HTML5, and Scopes, built an entirely new developer.ubuntu.com, created extensive CI and testing infrastructure to ensure quality as we evolve our platform, shipped two desktop releases, extended the charm store, delivered Juju Gui, spun up multiple clouds with Juju, and much more.
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Back in June, we were ready to announce the immediate availability for download of a new Linux distribution, called Unity-for-Arch, which used Ubuntu's Unity user interface on a basic Arch Linux Live CD.
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The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu will enable TRIM support for SSDs by default in its upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release. For those unfamiliar with what TRIM is, it is a command the OS instructs to the drive to wipe invalid flash blocks when they are no longer needed.
Mobile
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Ubuntu Phones should be released in 2014, according to Canonical community manager Jono Bacon.
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Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is no stranger to exploring rarefied territory. The man has, after all, been to space.
His interest in new frontiers means Ubuntu, the Linux distro he created, is also poised to make a great leap - to go where no Linux has gone before.
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He may have stepped back from the CEO role at Canonical, but Mark Shuttleworth is still very much the public face of Ubuntu.
He suffered a setback earlier this year when the crowdfunded Ubuntu Edge project – in which he invested a lot of personal capital, if not actual money – failed to get anywhere near its ambitious investment target. However, he tells us the project wasn’t a total failure, and may even be aped by the best-known smartphone maker of them all.
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Just before the holiday season sets in, Canonical has a surprise gift for all Ubuntu mobile fans. A new Ubuntu Touch image has been released and this is claimed to be the most stable release so far. Along with that, this release boasts a new way to dual boot with Android. This is a giant new step and will be specially welcome by enthusiasts who would like to experiment Ubuntu on their phones, leaving existing Android system untouched.
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Ubuntu for Android seems still far away but in the meantime Canonical is working on dual boot capability, allowing users to either boot into Ubuntu or Android.
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Canonical, creators of Ubuntu and more specifically Ubuntu Touch, have some potentially upsetting news. While in the process of developing Ubuntu Touch, the team has decided to narrow down hardware support to better focus on the operating system itself. They have officially dropped support for the Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus.
Wi-Fi and Security
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My colleague, Silviu Stahie, wrote an interesting article earlier today, regarding the “ability” of the Ubuntu Linux operating system to store Wi-Fi passwords in plain text, “thanks” to the default design of the NetworkManager application, initially developed by Red Hat.
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Ubuntu operating systems are storing the Wi-Fi profiles, including the clear text passwords, outside the home folder, making them a lot more accessible.
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