Ubuntu Rising: Desktops, Servers, Phones, and Beyond
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-05 14:32:32 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-05 14:35:55 UTC
Success Story
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One kindergarten in Heliopolis, a suburb of the Greek capital Athens, has successfully made the switch to free and open source. Following a break-in and the theft of four PCs last summer, a parent of one of the children attending the kindergarten donated two refurbished PCs, running Ubuntu Linux. The two PCs are now used by the staff, mostly for emailing with the Ministry of Education. They are also used in the classrooms for playing music, showing photos and playing videos as part of every day activities.
Ed: Some clients of ours at work, large businesses in fact, are moving to Ubuntu as well, ditching Windows XP before April. Stories like the above are no longer rare. One thing they explicitly request, however, is removal of Amazon spyware.
Desktop/Mainline
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OMG! Ubuntu! reports that beta 1 of Kubuntu 14.04, Lubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 and Xubuntu 14.04 are available for download. Each Ubuntu spin has tweaks and new features in this release.
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The Ubuntu developers are overhauling the ‘Scopes’ feature in Ubuntu. Scopes are used in Ubuntu by the Dash to get information for the user based on what the user searches. The most common of which are scopes to get lists of programs, music, videos etc. Canonical famously attracted some controversy when they introduced an Amazon scope that sent users search queries from the Dash to the Amazon site to get related products. Many users weren’t happy with their searches going to a third party site.
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Both Mir and Unity 8, (formerly known as Unity Next), are required components for convergence and for Touch apps to run on the desktop. When Canonical's plans for convergence were first announced, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was to use the Mir display server and the Unity 8 shell. With plans for a fully converged Ubuntu now put back to 15.04 or later, the 14.04 release will be sticking with X window server and Unity 7 for the time being.
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The archive is now in Feature Freeze as we preprare the release of 14.04 LTS in April.
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Ubuntu 13.10 was not a spectacular release as far as Ubuntu's history of major eye-popping changes is concerned. There were many things that could have been added to Saucy. Mir, for example, was one change many Ubuntu fanatics were waiting for. But, in favor of stability, the only thing new that the release brought to the table was Smart Scopes. Also, there were a few changes here and there, but for those who were looking for a complete 'upgrade,' Saucy was disappointing at its best. That's not to say that the release was bad. In fact, it set a solid foundation for the next big release, and that is Ubuntu 14.04.
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One of the things that always surprises me is how careless some folks can be when it comes to installing Ubuntu, or any distro for that matter. Usually this happens more to newer users, however this also challenges more experienced users as well.
Desktop Graphics
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This morning I wrote about Mesa 10.1 likely going into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but if you were hoping this means Ubuntu will enable VDPAU driver support for open-source hardware-accelerated video decoding, that improvement to video playback isn't going to happen with the official Ubuntu Mesa/Gallium3D driver packages.
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What started out as quite the slow news day turned out to be deceptively interesting. OMG!Ubuntu! has picked out five of the best community submissions for Ubuntu 14.04 wallpapers and Chema Martin posted a "visual tour" of Fedora 20. Bruce Byfield looks at why proprietary software isn't ported to Linux. Jack Wallen says Linux rules because it behaves "exactly how the user wants." Tonight's news also includes an announcement from the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat world's records, and the games to look forward to in 2014!
Local Menus
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When Canonical introduced its new Ubuntu Unity interface, a major design element was a global, universal menu that all apps would use. Things have changhed. Canonical is switching back to local app menus.
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In fact, while in the last months most of the Canonical commitment to Ubuntu has been directed to the Touch form factors, the “classic” desktop has not been forgotten at all and, we’re still working hard on it, to give our users the best experience and to approach smoothly to the convergence vision that we’ll get with Unity 8.
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The move is a return of sorts to Ubuntu's pre-Unity existence, when the Gnome desktop was Ubuntu's primary interface. This will be the first time, however, that application menus inside the window are officially a part of Unity.
Server
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The deal was announced on Thursday and means that developers who want to run Ubuntu on Joyent's advanced SmartOS-based infrastructure can now do with greater confidence in getting regular updates from Canonical, and performance guarantees.
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So, the basic values of of Ubuntu Server: freely available, provide developers access to the latest technology through a regular cadence of releases and optimise for cloud and scale out have been in place for years. Both adoption and revenue confirm it is the right strategy long term. Enterprises are evolving and starting to adopt Ubuntu and the model of restricting access to bits unless money is paid is now drawing to a close. Others are begrudgingly starting to accept this and trying to evolve their business models to compete with the momentum of Ubuntu.
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Oracle has done plenty to hurt the FLOSS community.
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One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle's MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle's Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle's neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, "We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux."
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Canonical has released an important kernel update for its still supported Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Server operating system, fixing five vulnerabilities discovered in the upstream Linux kernel 2.6.32 packages by various developers and kernel hackers.
Mobile Hardware
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CANONICAL ANNOUNCED earlier this year that the first Ubuntu smartphones will be made by BQ and Meizu. That created a wave of interest in how the open source Linux operating system (OS) distribution will look and work on a smartphone or tablet.
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Canonical announced last week that the forthcoming Ubuntu-powered phones will be manufactured by Chinese company Meizu and a Spanish phone designer and manufacturer named BQ.
The names of the two Ubuntu phones have been revealed today at MWC 2014, the BQ Aquaris and the Meizu MX3. Unfortunately, the prototype phones displayed at the Ubuntu booth in Barcelona have no operating system.
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We've only hit February, and it already looks like 2014 is going to be the year of the open source phone. Not only is Android continuing to dominate the smartphone space in terms of market share, but Mozilla is widening its Firefox OS phone strategy and Canonical announced this week that Spain's bq and China's Meizu will be the first companies to bring Ubuntu smartphones to global users.
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Jack Wallen responds to the Canonical announcement for the upcoming Ubuntu Phone.
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A little more than a year after Canonical introduced its Ubuntu Touch platform for smartphones, the free, open-source software developer announced the first signed agreements with handset-makers to ship devices running the Linux-based operating system.
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The first Ubuntu phones are the Meizu MX3 and BQ Aquaris. Check out our photos of Ubuntu software in action, as well as prototypes of the forthcoming phones.
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Mark Shuttleworth's ambitious IndieGoGo project may have failed, but that's not stopping Canonical from bringing its touch-friendly flavor of Linux Ubuntu to smartphones in the near future.
The company recently announced partnerships with the Chinese company Meizu and the Spanish company BQ to bring hardware devices running Ubuntu for phones. We got a quick demo of Ubuntu running on a Nexus 4 at this year's Mobile World Congress.
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Canonical, the developer of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has signed an agreement with a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer to soon ship Ubuntu phones to Chinese consumers.
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We've only hit February, and it already looks like 2014 is going to be the year of the open source phone. Not only is Android continuing to dominate the smartphone space in terms of market share, but Mozilla is widening its Firefox OS phone strategy and Canonical announced this week that Spain's bq and China's Meizu will be the first companies to bring Ubuntu smartphones to global users.
Maps
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Today at Mobile World Congress we showed off Mapbox support for Ubuntu Mobile with direct Mapbox.js integration into any HTML5 Ubuntu Mobile app. Developers can design totally custom maps and integrate them into their apps in minutes and even get access to native features like the camera and the accelerometer using Cordova (previously known as PhoneGap). Across all web, mobile and desktop experiences on Ubuntu an app will look exactly the same. If you have ever added a Mapbox map to a website, you’re ready to start developing for Ubuntu Mobile using HTML5.
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AND brings its mapping and location services to Ubuntu with an easy to use mobile application providing detailed local information and high granular map data. For the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona AND developed a map viewer with the proprietary AND navigation maps of Europe to start to showing the capabilities of AND for Ubuntu on phones.
Not Just Phones
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The highly anticipated Mobile World Congress (MWC) event will start tomorrow, February 24, in Barcelona, Spain. As expected, Canonical will be there to showcase the latest version of its Ubuntu operating system for mobile devices, dubbed “Ubuntu - the human touch.”
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With just a few days left for the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event at Barcelona, Canonical is pulling out all stops to show off Ubuntu Touch to the world. MWC takes place every year in February and is the world’s largest exhibition and conference congregation for the mobile industry.
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That’s the response of Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, when quizzed over whether it’s scarier to go into space or try to launch a unified OS platform. As the first citizen of an independent African country to travel to space and the public face of ensuring the Ubuntu OS makes it onto smartphones and tablets, he should know.
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While you may not recognize the name Canonical, chances are you've heard of its Debian-based Linux OS called Ubuntu. We spoke to Jane Silber, CEO of the privately held UK-based company, about her transition to CEO, the company's past, and its plans for spreading Ubuntu everywhere from the cloud to tablets to smartphones.
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Canonical just announced that the first two Ubuntu phones will be coming this year thanks to Meizu and bq. Though these phones won't be available until later this year, the company was on hand at MWC to show off its operating system and give folks a chance to get to grips with the software that will ship on upcoming hardware from its partners. We stopped by Canonical to check it out for ourselves.
