Canonical

Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: an Interview with Canonical

Petros Koutoupis — Thu, 09 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure changes the entire landscape of service offerings for open-source software. Instead of itemizing and charging for each and every component or add-on, Canonical promises its customers a per-node service package, regardless of the technologies running on it. I was able to sit down and chat with Stephan Fabel, who was generous enough to provide a bit more detail around this exciting announcement.

Petros Koutoupis: Tell us about yourself.

Stephan Fabel: My name is Stephan Fabel, and I am Director of Product over at Canonical. So, I am running a team as the Product Manager, and I am responsible for the portfolio of products that go out to our customers.

Petros: For our readers who are unfamiliar, what is Ubuntu Advantage?

Stephan: As you might know, Ubuntu always has been freely available as an open-source Linux distribution for everybody to consume. And, for those users who wish to enter that commercial relationship with Canonical, either because they are interested in our additional bit-streams that we offer like kernel patches, extended security maintenance, FIPS compliance crypto libraries, or because they would like to get support for each of those open infrastructure components that we are covering, Ubuntu Advantage is the program that they would subscribe to.

Petros: What makes this recent announcement of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure so exciting?

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Review: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Laptop

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

A look at Dell's thin and sleek XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop that now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed.

Canonical recently made an official announcement on its company blog stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop (that is, Project Sputnik) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I'm a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop eventually arrived, and like a child on Christmas morning, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first time.

This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it's mobile (which is very important in my book), thin and sleek. Not only does the device look good, but it also performs very well.

General Specifications

In my possession is the 7th generation of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. This generation ships with an Intel Core i7 8th Gen microprocessor. It is a four-core, eight-threaded (hyperthreaded) i7-8550U CPU operating at a 1.8GHz frequency. With this configuration, the system itself reports eight CPUs. The system is installed with 16GB of RAM.

First Impressions

Upon first boot, you're greeted with a Dell welcome screen followed by a generic set of Ubuntu-related questions (such as license agreement, keyboard layouts, timezone and so on). Toward the end, you are given an option to create a recovery USB image, which could be very handy one day. If you opt out of creating one, no worries, you can go back and create one at a later time.

Figure 1. The Dell Recovery Media Menu

The first thing I did, after logging in to my user session for the very first time, was run a software update.

Although this does not at all relate to the quality of the device, I did find it a bit strange that the operating system was pre-installed with both Chrome and Chromium web browsers. I'm not sure why anyone would need both, but they both were there. If you're a Firefox user, you'll need to install it from the Ubuntu Software center.

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Ubuntu Desktop in the Hyper-V Gallery, an Interview with Canonical and Microsoft

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Late last month, Canonical made an astonishing announcement: an optimized image of Ubuntu Desktop is now available from Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. This wonderful new feature is primarily intended for Windows 10 Pro desktop users needing to run Ubuntu Desktop guest virtual machines.

Although the announcement itself came as a bit of a surprise, even more so when you consider the long tumultuous history between both Microsoft and Linux, it does, however, indicate that times (and the company) have been changing. In recent years, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to embrace open source and open-source technologies.

The announcement did leave me with a few questions, so I took the opportunity to sit down with Will Cooke, the Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, and Sarah Cooley, Program Manager at Microsoft.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourselves and describe your primary role both at your company and for this project.

Will Cooke: I am the director of engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. Our team is responsible for putting together every Ubuntu Desktop release, selecting which packages and which features we're going to ship, making sure that each release is of the right quality and working with partners on projects around Ubuntu Desktop—for example, OEMs shipping Ubuntu Desktop on their hardware and, in this instance, Microsoft, to improve the virtual guest experience for Ubuntu Desktop on Windows 10. For this project, I worked with our internal teams to line up the requirements for supporting the enhanced session and to make sure the features we needed would be included in 18.04 LTS and with Microsoft engineers and product managers to make sure we were always in sync on the latest progress.

Sarah Cooley: I am a program manager on the virtualization team at Microsoft. We have been working closely with the developer platform team in Microsoft, Will Cooke's team in Canonical, and xRDP's community to improve the Linux virtual machine experience on Windows 10—starting with Ubuntu. To provide the experience you see today, Hyper-V developers contributed to xRDP to make sure open source communities can run Linux virtual machines in enhanced session mode while working with Canonical to provide all of the tools necessary for Ubuntu to run well with Hyper-V with no additional setup. Outside this effort, I also work on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Linux containers on Windows.

PK: Why Hyper-V and why Ubuntu Desktop?

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Why the Failure to Conquer the Desktop Was Great for GNU/Linux

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

AI: open source's next big win.

Canonical recently launched Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's an important release. In part, that's because Canonical will support it for five years, making it one of the relatively rare LTS products in Ubuntu's history. Ubuntu 18.04 also marks a high-profile return to GNOME as the default desktop, after a few years of controversial experimentation with Unity. The result is regarded by many as the best desktop Ubuntu so far (that's my view too, for what it's worth). And yet, the emphasis at launch lay elsewhere. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu, said:

Multi-cloud operations are the new normal. Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.

The bulk of the official 18.04 LTS announcement is about Ubuntu's cloud computing features. On the main web site, Ubuntu claims to be "The standard OS for cloud computing", citing (slightly old) research that shows "70% of public cloud workloads and 54% of OpenStack clouds" use it. Since Canonical is a privately held company, it doesn't publish a detailed breakdown of its operations, just a basic summary. That means it's hard to tell just how successful the cloud computing strategy is proving. But, the fact that Shuttleworth is now openly talking about an IPO—not something to be undertaken lightly—suggests that there is enough good news to convince investors to throw plenty of money at Canonical when the prospectus spells out how the business is doing.

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Embracing Snaps: an Interview with Canonical and Slack

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

What Is a Snap?

A "snap" application package is a self-contained piece of software, and although it originally was designed to be hosted on Ubuntu, the package will work across a range of other Linux distributions. This isn't your traditional APT or YUM manager hosting DEB and RPM (or other) package formats.

Again, the appeal to snap packages is that they are self-contained (that is, containerized). They are designed to auto-update and are safe to run. A snap package is bundled with its dependencies, which is what allows it to run on all other major Linux distribution without any modification. It also doesn't have any dependency to any package manager or application store. But, don't misunderstand this—a package manager or application store still can host one or more snap packages; however, the snap package is not dependent to that manager.

Snapcraft is the official tool for software developers to package their software programs in a Snap format.

Sitting Down with Canonical and Slack

Earlier this year on January 18th, Canonical announced the first iteration of Slack as a snap. But, why was this announcement so important? I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Evan Dandrea of Canonical and Felix Riesberg of Slack. They gave me the answers I was looking for.

Evan's team at Canonical builds the platform to make everyone's life easier—that is, Snapcraft. And Felix's team leverages that very same platform to bring wonderful applications, such as Slack, to your Linux desktop.

First, for those not familiar with Slack, it's an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses (of all sizes) to communicate effectively. It's organized, easily accessible, and more important, it allows for better and more efficient communication than email. Slack isn't limited to just professional use; it also can be adopted for more personal uses.

The Interview

Petros Koutoupis: Why snap?

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Weapons of MaaS Deployment

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:06:02 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

My Day with Canonical

I've been researching OpenStack deployment methods lately and so when I got an email from Canonical inviting me to check out how they deploy OpenStack using their Metal as a Service (MaaS) software on their fantastic Orange Box demo platform I jumped at the opportunity. While I was already somewhat familiar with MaaS and Juju from research for my Official Ubuntu Server Book, I'd never seen it in action at this scale. Plus a chance to see the Orange Box--a ten-server computing cluster and network stack that fits in a box about the size of a old desktop computer--was not something I could pass up.

We made all the necessary arrangements and bright and early one morning Dustin Kirkland showed up at my office with a laptop and the second-largest Pelican case I'd ever seen. My team sat down with him as he unpacked and explained a little bit about the Orange Box. Throughout the day we walked through the MaaS and Juju interfaces and used them to bootstrap a few servers that were then configured with Juju: Canonical's service orchestration project. By the end of the day we had not only deployed OpenStack, along the way we set up a Hadoop cluster and even a multi-node transcoding cluster that split up transcoding tasks among the different nodes in the cluster and transcoded a high-definition movie down to a more consumable size in no time. In this article I'm going to introduce the basic concepts behind MaaS, highlight some of it's more interesting new features, and point out a few interesting tips I picked up along the way that you might find useful even if you don't use MaaS or Juju.

It's Orange. It's a Box. It's an Orange Box.

Figure 1: The Orange Box

It's hard to start a discussion about a Canonical MaaS demo without discussing the Orange Box just because it's so cool. I'm not going to spend too much time on it though, first because it's already gotten a good deal of coverage in some other news outlets (ArsTechnica in particular had a great write-up about it). Secondly, while cool, the hardware is still just a demo platform and its purpose is to showcase how MaaS works on real hardware that you can see and touch. There are ten individual servers inside the Orange Box with the following specs:

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Who Contributes the Most to LibreOffice?

Susan Linton — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Susan Linton

Cedric Bosdonnat has been tracking contributions to LibreOffice since its announced fork from OpenOffice.org. He uses Git Data Miner to gleen results from the main branch of LibreOffice Git repositories. Git Data Miner is more commonly known as the tool used by Jonathan Corbet in his periodic kernel code reports.

Bosdonnat began tracking line contributions in the middle of September 2010 with the original 14 contributions being made by Oracle. Oracle actually contributes code to OpenOffice.org, and then LibreOffice merges those changes, thus resulting in Oracle's contributions to the new fork. These 112 contributions have continued throughout development, but are dwarfed by the contributions of new developers.

New contributors are those that have signed on to help with LibreOffice since the fork, either with code or translations. These contributions make up well over half of the total new changes found in LibreOffice as of mid-February. Weekly contributions in this area have averaged between 20 and 30 with a total number of 517 line contributions.

Those who worked on OpenOffice.org previously and are not employeed by any other major contributor are classified as known contributors. While their number of contributions have been fewer, they averaged approximately five per week since the fork. This totals 90 contributions in the 22 weeks of development.

Novell has been credited with a large portion of the contributions made to LibreOffice. When looking through changelogs the name Novell is seen over and over again. They were significant contributors to OpenOffice.org and many of their patches are used in LibreOffice to this day. Novell developers averaged in the neighborhood of 10 contributions per week for a total of 205 since the fork.

Red Hat, who also contributed to OpenOffice.org, has chipped in as well. With usually two contributions per week, Red Hat developers have provided 39 patches since the fork.

The newest known name to join the contributors list is Canonical. They contributed the Human theme and a later fix, but more Ubuntu integration code is likely. Björn Michaelsen contributed 2 patches in the last few weeks so far.

Bosdonnat says there are 133 new coders and 55 localizers since the fork. There seemed to be a slight dip at the end of last year according the graph and Bosdonnat attributes that to the festivities of the holiday season.

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Ubuntu update policy change is probably a good thing

Michael Reed — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Despite some premature reports on the net, Canonical isn’t moving to a rolling release schedule for Ubuntu. However, the organisation is open to making some changes to the way that some software packages are updated. It’s seems likely that a mechanism that supports the adding of up to date application packages outside of the normal software repository updates is probably on the cards, and I’d say that it’s about time.

The problem

Ubuntu's six month release schedule allows Canonical to ensure stability and means that organisations know that they are getting a reliable and predictable system. The snag is that updates to software applications tend to be mere bug fixes and security updates. This means that users who only use the official method to update their system have been left stuck with outdated software. Sometimes this is a big deal, as having to make do with a six month old version of Firefox, for example, makes the Linux desktop seem unwieldy compared to Windows.

It’s not just Ubuntu that suffers from this problem either. The current Debian stable release, Lenny, only offers KDE 4.1 in its repository. As KDE SC 4 users will recall, 4.1 was almost unusable. The solution, in this case, is to switch from Debian stable to unstable, but obviously, not everyone is comfortable making such a fundamental move, but you don’t have much choice if you want to use KDE 4 on Debian.

People with a bit more expertise can add the software that they need by compiling from source, installing a binary or by adding a PPA. However, the point is that Ubuntu is supposed to offer a good Linux experience for non experts, and these other methods (and backing out of them) are fiddly.

Visiting the Firefox website illustrates the problem. The front page correctly identifies the system that the user is running and offers a “Download Firefox!” icon. However, this icon links to a .tar.bz containing the binary files, with no explanation of how to install it, or for that matter, how to keep the new version constantly updated. Things get even worse when the hypothetical “average computer user” wants to try out Firefox 4 beta for a quick look.

In contrast, a competent Windows user could probably handle the upgrade. To that user, Windows will seem like the better system, and in all fairness, and from their perspective, they may have a point. Windows does allow you to easily add anything you want to your system, and it's hardly unreasonable to want to try out the latest version of Firefox, Chrome or Open Office, for example.

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