Sunday, February 22nd 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Codenamed ''Karmic Koala'', Eying Cloud-Computing and Netbooks

Ubuntu's contribution to propagating Linux to the client platforms (general desktop/notebook) is invaluable. Its developers are known to codename major builds of the OS after animals. An upcoming version, 9.10 has been codenamed "Karmic Koala", after the cute and cuddly animal from south-east Australia. Going by Ubuntu's six-month development cycle, 9.10 should follow 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" slated for this April, and should be coming out by October.

The new client-version is expected to be netbook-friendly, with having significantly lower boot times. The target booting time for 9.04 is 25 seconds, while the developers hope to improve that figure further with 9.10. The developers will be integrating features from Intel's Moblin platform in order to improve performance on Atom-based devices. The Server Edition based on Ubuntu, which is steadily gaining in adoption, yet lagging behind offerings from market heavyweights such as Red Hat and Novell, will also get its share of improvements, one of the most important of them being enhanced support for cloud-computing.

While cloud-computing serves as a good business idea for companies handling client-side products, it serves as an equally good idea for companies handling servers, a crucial unit in the client-computing model. Part of the plan is to create a set of standard Ubuntu Server Amazon Machine Image (AMI) profiles that will provide a starting point for creating specialized images, simplifying deployment of Ubuntu on Amazon's EC2 platform. Support for Eucalyptus, an open source framework for implementing a self-hosted elastic computing cluster, will also be integrated in the server variant. The Eucalyptus project, which is developed by UCSB, will enable organizations to get many of the advantages of elastic computing in their own data-centers, including the ability to scale down power consumption when load is low.

Canonical, the organisation behind Ubuntu, will use the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) taking place in Barcelona in May for further planning and development of Karmic Koala.
Source: Ars Technica
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26 Comments on Ubuntu 9.10 Codenamed ''Karmic Koala'', Eying Cloud-Computing and Netbooks

#26
mdm-adph
Polaris573I don't recall the exact error message. Something about it being unable to enumerate USB device on port 2 and then it would cycle through various USB ports and then switch to some other error message about not being able to see drives. On a past board (MSI 865PE Neo2 Platinum) it wouldn't recognize my drives because of the jmicron IDE controller it used which caused me several hours of frustration because of my somewhat anemic Linux knowledge. So when it started giving me grief this time I said to myself, "Fedora 10 is installed and working great just use that" and didn't write down the error messages or do any research to try to resolve the problem. I did remove all USB devices except my keyboard which did not fix the problem.

Anyway I'm not looking for a fix and I'm not saying it's a bad OS because it was okay when it worked, but I don't think it brings anything to the table that Fedora or Suse don't have. I guess I've just had weird configurations but Ubuntu as the "Ultimate Noob Friendly Distribution" just hasn't been true for me. I've actually found the other distributions to be just as easy or easier.
Well, you're obviously a Fedora fan, so I'm not going to try and convert you. :laugh: I have to say, though, there had to be something unusual about your setup or the Ubuntu disk you were using (stuff has changed quite a bit from version to version), because I've never encountered anything like that.

And as to what Ubuntu brings to the table? I'll agree with you there -- there's nothing new technologically, at least. Structurally it's the same as any Debian installation, and all Linux is similiar to each other in the end.

Where Ubuntu shines is in the community, the very prominent founder's vision (his money doesn't hurt, either), and most importantly (as Apple can vouch), the marketing. :D
blueskynisIt was 8.04.1 on Gigabyte board with 740G int. graphics. After few unsuccessful X starts up and some screen flickering I was dropped to terminal... :shadedshu seems this graphics/BIOS isn't VESA standard compliant.
Well, that stinks. Bad of ATI to do that, but you can't blame Ubuntu for that. :(
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