Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-10-21

Ubuntu Development Update

It is always an exciting time when a new release opens. As a developer you get to finally merge the feature you would have liked to see in the last release already and you can merge changes you submitted to Upstream. We have a 27 weeks until the new release gets out, so lots of time to get everything into a tip-top LTS-release worthy state.

As mentioned in the last update, Matthias Klose and Colin Watson have been coordinating the opening of the ‘precise’ series, here’s a few key changes that have already landed: an updated toolchain and a 3.1 linux pre-release, among 570+ other uploads to ‘precise’. It’s a great to see this well-oiled machinery getting to work at the start of every cycle and everybody working hard to reduce the delta between Ubuntu and Upstream (including Debian).

If you want to get involved with Ubuntu development, now is a great time. You still have 27 weeks left to get your great work out to millions of happy LTS users.

Events

Ubuntu Open Week
This week Ubuntu Open Week happened (in fact, today is the last day), with heaps of great sessions about all kinds of Ubuntu topics. Daniel ‘dholbach’ Holbach gave a double session about “Getting started with Ubuntu Development” and got loads of great questions from the audience.

Ubuntu Developer Summit
UDS is kicking off on 31st October in sunny Florida. This is where all the plans for 12.04 are going to be discussed and long lists of work items are written. Check out Stefano Rivera’s list of specification blueprints that were last registered to get an idea what’s going to get discussed.

Spotlight: Ubuntu Friendly

While we were working together in Berlin, I had a chat with Ara Pulido, who has been leading the Ubuntu Friendly effort.

Hello Ara, you are one of the heads behind “Ubuntu Friendly”? For those of us who don’t know about it yet, can you explain what it is?

Ubuntu Friendly is a programme that tries to collect hardware test results from the Ubuntu community and present the list of systems in a way that is useful for other Ubuntu users. The website shows a rated list of systems based on those test results. For those who are already wondering, the rating is calculated automatically based on the results, there is no room for subjection here. We divide the components of a system in “core” and “additional” components. If a system fails one of the core components, it gets only 1 star, and if it passes all the core components it gets 3 stars (good enough!). The remaining two stars are given by additional components. A submission can also get small rating penalties if the user skipped a core test because they didn’t have the peripherals needed to do the testing (like an external monitor, or a USB stick).

What is the state of things in Ubuntu Friendly now? Does it already have everything you and your team want?

During the 11.10 cycle we have developed the backend and we have polished the System Testing test suite, so it tests only hardware stuff. Right now we just released the beta of the programme and we want the programme to be stable once 12.04 LTS gets released. In order to achieve that we need to get as much data and feedback as possible in the next months, so we learn which are the pain points and fix the site and client accordingly.

How many people did you have contributing already?

We are very pleased with the results we are getting in the first week of Ubuntu Friendly. We released the beta a week ago and we already got more than 500 submissions!, 135 of them with more than 3 stars and it increases every day!

Is there anything people can do to help out?

Yes! The simplest way to help is obviously testing and submitting your system. It is very easy to do and it won’t take more than 15 minutes to complete. We have some nice instructions and a screencast to help you getting started at: http://friendly.ubuntu.com/participate/. If you are very excited with the project and want to do more, you can join us in the Ubuntu Friendly Squad and help us shaping up the tools and tests for the next cycle!

What are your plans for 12.04?

As said, in the 11.10 cycle we have focused in setting the needed infrastructure to make Friendly happen, but there is still a lot to be polished until we can remove our A-Team font BETA message from the site We will be focusing in improving the test suite and rating calculation based on the results and feedback that we get. The other big change for 12.04 LTS will be the System Testing UI. We know it does not look fancy enough and that’s why we have decided to just completely rewrite the UI, so we can make it look nicer and more integrated in the Ubuntu experience.

Thanks a bunch for the interview! You rock!

Thanks to you!

Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

  • Be interactive and reach us most immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
  • Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
  • Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Identi.ca or Twitter.

Ubuntu 12.04 to feature extended support period for desktop users

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-21

Five-year Long Term Support (LTS) makes Ubuntu a compelling choice for the business desktop

London, October 21st, 2011: Canonical today announced it would be extending the support and maintenance period for its upcoming Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu for desktop users from three years to five years. The move comes in response to increasing demand for Ubuntu desktops in corporate environments where longer maintenance periods are the norm. It brings the desktop product into line with Ubuntu Server which continues with five years of support for LTS releases.

April 2012 will see the fourth LTS release of Ubuntu. LTS releases have become particularly popular with Ubuntu business users. Canonical’s own survey data shows over 70% of server users are deployed on LTS versions of the product. Bringing this extended support to the desktop is a response to similar popularity in businesses of the desktop LTS releases.

The first two years of the LTS period will benefit businesses by including hardware updates (through regular point releases) allowing them to keep up to date with the latest hardware upgrades. Maintenance updates will continue for a further three years. Businesses can now rely on always running an LTS version regardless of their hardware refresh rate.

PC manufacturers can now standardise their business-focused range of PCs on an LTS release with a five year support period. This is a more compelling proposition to bring to their customer base especially aligned with the Ubuntu Advantage support programs from Canonical which will fully support the new LTS period

“Ubuntu has always been known for its ability to keep pace with the latest applications and hardware” says Rick Spencer, Ubuntu Engineering Director at Canonical. “But as our user-base grows and matures the ability to plan for the longer term is vital. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will give desktop users the perfect combination of keeping pace with hardware changes and extended support depending on their needs”.

Ubuntu’s fourth LTS release comes at a time when the product has seen unprecedented uptake at a large scale in a variety of businesses. Qualcomm, the City of Munich, LVM have all spoken recently of their use of Ubuntu at large scale. With

Important Links

To read more about Ubuntu’s desktop products for business see: http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop/
For Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage services see:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services
To read more about Ubuntu in action see:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/case-studies

About Canonical
Canonical provides engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide. As the company behind the Ubuntu project, Canonical is committed to the production and support of Ubuntu – an ever-popular and fast-growing open-source operating system. It aims to ensure that Ubuntu is available to every organisation and individual on servers, desktops, laptops and netbooks.

Canonical partners with computer hardware manufacturers to certify Ubuntu, provides migration, deployment, support and training services to businesses, and offers online services direct to end users. Canonical also builds and maintains collaborative, open source development tools to ensure that organisations and individuals can participate fully in innovations within the open-source community. For more information, please visit the Canonical website.

Originally posted on the Canonical Website on Friday, October, 21, 2011.

OpenWeek Summary for Thursday

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-21

It’s been an exciting Ubuntu Open Week so far with sessions yesterday, Thursday, October 20, 2011 which included:

The final day of Ubuntu (11.10) Open Week sessions start today, Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1400 UTC.

Day 5 Sessions include:

  • How to use Ask Ubuntu effectively
  • Accessibility in Ubuntu
  • Using Unity like a Boss, tips and tricks
  • Best ways to find technical support help in Ubuntu

Session Logs:

For those of you who may have missed sessions this weeks the logs are linked to each session listed on the schedule.

Participation:

Please see the Ubuntu Open Week participation wiki page for more information.

Originally posted here by Amber Graner on Friday, October 21, 2011

Precision Planning; Prepping for 12.04 LTS

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-20

In just over a week, quite a large cross-section of the Ubuntu community and representatives from many free software projects and companies will gather in Orlando to map out the Precise Pangolin. Now’s the time to prepare for the event, with 11.10 out (well done everybody!) and the key infrastructure slotting into place.

Figuring out the optimal balance of goals is the work of the summit, but we can lay out some over-arching themes that have been in progress during this meta-cycle and come to their full fruition in the LTS release. We can also remind ourselves of the ways in which an LTS is different, and the impact that will have on our choices in Orlando.

Being an LTS

As Dustin pointed out, this is the fourth Ubuntu LTS release, and as such it needs to carry on, and entrench, the reputation of the LTS as a carrier-grade platform for mission-critical server deployments and large scale desktop deployments. That means:

  • Adjusting the cycle to allocate more time for resolving issues
  • Introducing minimal new infrastructure or platform-visible change
  • Goal-driven and continuously benchmarked programs of action around performance
  • First-class accessibility for those with special interaction needs
  • Enablement and certification of the sorts of hardware people will deploy at scale and in the datacenter
Rick Spencer and his team have put some thought into one of the critical challenges that LTS releases face, which is the need to support newer hardware over a longer period of time. Traditionally, Linux distributions have tried to prioritize items to backport, but that puts the stability of known-good configurations very much at risk. Rick will outline the strategy we’ll adopt for this at UDS, which I think makes the most out of the work done for every release of Ubuntu.

Carrier-grade Cloud Infrastructure and Guest

Ubuntu is the #1 OS for cloud computing, whether you measure it by the number of instances running on all the major public clouds, the number of Ubuntu-based cloud appliances, the number of public and private clouds running on Ubuntu host OS. The extraordinary diversity of the Ubuntu community, the calibre of collaboration between Ubuntu and OpenStack, and the focused efforts of Canonical to make Ubuntu useful in the cloud have all contributed to that position. In 12.04 LTS we must deliver:

  • world’s best cloud infrastructure powered by OpenStack’s corresponding major release
  • perfect support for cloud-oriented hardware from Canonical’s partner IHV’s
  • a great hybrid-cloud story, for those using a mixture of private and public clouds
  • world’s best guest OS on AWS, Rackspace and other public cloud infrastructures
A key focus is making it easy to bootstrap and manage services across public, private and hybrid clouds, and Juju charms are the magic by which we’re flattening all those cloud substrates and bringing devops practices into the Ubuntu administrator toolbox. Those who attended the recent OpenStack Summit will have caught the buzz around Juju, which brings APT-like semantics to cloud service deployments. There’s a rapidly growing collection of Juju charms which define common services and allow you to get started immediately on all the major public and private cloud infrastructures; I keep hearing how clean and easy it is to charm a new piece of software for cloud deployment so I’m sure both the number of charms and charmers will grow exponentially.
Right now Juju charms can be deployed on bare-metal farms of hardware with no virtualisation, such as Hadoop or Condor compute clusters, Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure, Ubuntu’s OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure, and on the developer workstation using LXC containers so developers can use charms locally which are then re-used by administrators deploying to the cloud. I think there are Juju contributors working on support for a few other cloud infrastructures too, it will be interesting to see what lands by 12.04.

Pangolin-worthy Server Release

We have a proud heritage from Debian which 12.04 LTS needs to celebrate and maintain; although we have some key advantages for enterprises deploying Ubuntu over Debian in our ability to enable some additional security features in the Linux kernel and toolchain, as well as support, certification and assurance, the lean-mean-green-machine nature of the Ubuntu Server experience owes much to Debian’s focus on quality and precision.

12.04 will be the first LTS to support the ARM architecture on selected ARM SoC parts. In a world where computational density is increasingly prioritized over single-thread performance, the entry of ARM to the server market is a very interesting shift. Ubuntu has established a very strong competence in ARM and I think the 12.04 LTS release will power a new generation of power-focused hardware for the data centre.

Pixel-perfect desktop

The nail-biting transitions to Unity and Gnome 3 are behind us, so this cycle is an opportunity to put perfection front and center. We have a gorgeous typeface that was designed for readability, which is now available in Light and Medium as well as Regular and Bold, and has a Mono variant as well. That’s an opportunity to work through the whole desktop interface and make sure we’re using exactly the right weight in each place, bringing the work we’ve been doing for several cycles fully into focus.

We also need to do justice to the fact that 12.04 LTS will be the preferred desktop for many of the world’s biggest Linux desktop deployments, in some cases exceeding half a million desktops in a single institution. So 12.04 is also an opportunity to ensure that our desktop is manageable at scale, that it can be locked down in the ways institutions need, and that it can be upgraded from 10.04 LTS smoothly as promised. Support for multiple monitors will improve, since that’s a common workplace requirement.

During UDS we’ll build out the list of areas for refinement, polish and ‘precisioneering’, but the theme for all of this work is one of continuous improvement; no new major infrastructure, no work on pieces which are not design-complete at the conclusion of the summit.

While there are some remaining areas we’d like to tweak the user experience, they will probably be put on hold so we can focus on polish, performance and predictability. I’d like to improve the user experience around Workspaces for power users, and we’ll publish our design work for that, but I think it would be wisest for us to defer that unless we get an early and effective contribution of that code.

It’s going to be a blast in Orlando, as UDS always manages to bring together a fantastic crowd. And it’s going to be a beautiful, memorable release of Ubuntu in April 2012!

Originally posted here by Mark Shuttleworth on Thursday, October 20th, 2011

OpenWeek Summary for Wednesday

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-20

Day 4 of Ubuntu Open Week starts at 1400 UTC today. Today’s schedule (Thursday, October 20th, 2011) includes a Q&A with Rick Spencer. As Jorge Castro said yesterday, “Rick is the engineering manager for the Ubuntu Platform, so he’s got good working knowledge of Ubuntu as a whole, so bring your hard questions!”

Thursday sessions include:

  • 1400 UTC: How to Become a Bug Guru!
  • 1500 UTC: Ubuntu Orchestra — Servers, Live and in Concert!
  • 1600 UTC: Xubuntu: What is that?
  • 1700 UTC: Canonical and the Community

We had some great Ubuntu Open Week sessions yesterday; those sessions included:

Want more information on how you can participate?  Check out the Ubuntu Open Week wiki page.

Originally posted here by Amber Graner on Thursday, October 20th, 2011.