Compound Thinking

Ubuntu Below Zero Day 2

Well, there’s a lot going on here in Montreal. I’ve been attending most of the Ubuntu Server related BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. There seems to be a lot of attention being paid to making Ubuntu an even better server platform.

Ubuntu Server already today has a lot going for it. It has a very stable debian heritage, along with the ability to push out new server packages more quickly than debian.

I have been using Ubuntu on a couple of non-critical servers since last November, and I have had no complaints. And there was some movement toward server support for both Warty and Breezy, but this looks like the largest push so far.

Of course the Ubuntu team is planning on having stable packages of server software that they will able to support for five years. They also want to have these packages work “out of the box” as much as possible. Not only that there are plans to:

• have community testing of server hardware,
• work out a program with vendors to certify their hardware against Dapper Drake
• improving the debian-installer recovery mode with lots of shiny new coolness
• create integrated SSL support for all the applications require it
• include stuff necessary to support vendor server tools for configuration and remote management

There is more going on, but much of it is still not in any kind of determined state. But it is good to see all this forward momentum for Ubuntu on the server.

Understanding the Dapper Drake Development Process

My first day at the Ubuntu Developers Conference (UBZ) has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

There are a few key decisions going into the next release cycle that inform everything else.

As I mentioned yesterday the next version of Ubuntu is going to be supported for a long time. In order to make that happen, the Ubuntu Distribution team is going to make a couple of minor changes to the release process. Most of these come under the basic theme of minimizing large scale changes.

Earlier on in the discussion of the Dapper process Jeff Waugh suggested the possibility of not syncing up to the latest stuff in Debian unstable on this cycle, and just moving forward from 5.11 base. The idea behind this suggestion was to limit the number of unknown bugs that would be added to the distribution. However, Matt Zimmerman pointed out that ” Debian and upstream fix more bugs than we do, hands down” so this idea has been rethought a bit.

That said, there is going to be an overall reduction in the number of new crazy things going into Ubuntu. But as of last night there will be one major exception — the LiveCD based installer.

This is making it in, not just because it will make the user experience better, but also because with a LiveCD installer Ubuntu will only have to ship one CD through ship-it. And that in turn means they will be able to support more than one flavor of Ubuntu. This means that they will be shipping Kubuntu cd’s for all the KDE centric folks out there.

But all of that comes from this morning’s first talk, and since then I have been participating mostly in talks about Ubuntu Server stuff, and I’ll try to blog about that more soon.

Dapper Drake

Dapper Drake is the code name for the next version of Ubuntu Linux. It will not just be supported for the standard 18 months, but for 5 years on the server, and 3 years on the desktop.

This is possible because we are looking at a confluence of upstream stability. GCC, x.org, the kernel, and other key components are now at, or are quickly approaching stable releases, so it only makes sense to capitalize on this to produce a long-term stable release.

This is not a move away from the 6 month release cycle that Ubuntu is now famous for. So, there will be 10 new Ubuntu versions before Dapper Drake is no longer supported.

It will be interesting to see what this does for Ubuntu in the enterprise. I’m sure that some large enterprises want this, but I’m also pretty sure that they are going to want a few other things too.

I will have more updates on stuff that was discussed today this evening.

Ubuntu Below Zero

I’ll be flying out to Montreal on Saturday to attend Ubuntu Below Zero. I’m a serious fan of Ubuntu Linux, and of the people that make it happen. And I’m excited to start participating more in the whole Ubuntu community.

So far my contributions have been in giving talks on Ubuntu at LUGs and conferences, helping install Ubuntu on a lot of people’s machines at various install fests, reading the Ubuntu mailing lists, and assuring questions for the folks around Ann Arbor who have Ubuntu related questions. But I am really looking forward to crossing over the line from consumer/advocate/helper of a pre-existing product to someone who participates in the development of the new version.

I want to make sure that it is drop-dead easy for developers working on Rails, TurboGears, Cake, or any of the next generation of web development frameworks to live and breathe Ubuntu.

I also want to make it easy to create a meta-package with the tools that a small business needs to get up and running on Linux quickly and easily. We have all the pieces in place (well, calendaring needs a bit of work, but it looks like it’s going to be there soon!). Unfortunately, there’s so many choices and the configuration and integration project still too hard.

A lot of small businesses set up Microsoft SMB Server 2000 as their first server. It’s cheap and easy and it works — mostly! — and then when they grew out of it, they are stuck paying thousands of dollars for upgrades to the “real” Microsoft back office products. And for a small company all that money that could be more profitably spent in developing their core business.

All of this resolves down to my key goal — I want to reduce the cost of entry for small business, and make it easier for new companies to get started without the need to go to venture capital firms. Ubuntu, Linus, and open source generally can reduce the need for significant capital expenses early in the life of a small business, and in the end that is going to improve the economic outlook for small businesses, and help the economy, and facilitate innovation.

Ubuntu 5.10 Released Today

For those of you who don’t know I think Ubuntu Linux is one of the most interesting, exciting and useful new things to hit IT in the last year. In the less than 1 year since their first release they have:

• Released a high-quality distro 2 more times (as of today!)
• built a sizable community of developers and maintainers
• Gathered a huge international community of people who help new users
• Brought the “it-just-works” philosophy to a whole new level in the Linux world
• Made their distribution popular with people new to Linux, as well as kernel hackers

They spend their entire advertising budget shipping free CD’s to anyone who asks for one. There are going to be release parties all around the world today and tomorrow.

I started using Ubuntu Linux last November when I could not get ZABBIX to compile on my SUSE 9.0 box because some of SUSE’s MySQL and NetSNMP libraries used non-standard compile options, and would not link up correctly.

While I was recompiling and getting these things running on SUSE, I installed Ubuntu on another box, just to test it out, and before you know it ZABBIX was working on the Ubuntu box without having to re-compile anything.

And I fell in love with the clean interface and user friendly setup. To me the most amazing thing is that the setup is very friendly to both nubies and “power-users,” which works great for me because I find that no matter how much I learn, sometimes I’m still a nubie.

I think the Ubuntu people understand how Viral Marketing works, and are making a remarkable product which has the potential to change the way we interact with our computers and perhaps more importantly the way we interact with the people that build the software we run.

Interacting with the Ubuntu community is great due to the simple — but extraordinarily powerful — code of conduct. This is probably the most important hack the Ubuntu people have come up with, in terms of creating a thriving community, and bringing in new developers. Which goes to show that some of the biggest market changing innovations are not particularly technical, or even all that new.

If you are interested in learning more, please visit http://ubuntudetroit.org/tour/quicktour.html

P.S. If you install Ubuntu 5.10 you might also be interested in an installer for MP3 and other multi-media support — Easy Ubuntu.