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

[btarunr]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[xfire]

Yay for netbook friendly.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

I vote for the next project codename to be 'Spankie McSpank'

 

[PCpraiser100]

I vote for the next project codename to be 'Spankie McSpank'

LOL...That name would be awesome. Open Source is cool this way because their innovation is not complex, so they can name it whatever way they like it.

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

Netbook friendly FTW.

 

[xfire]

they should have opinion polls for the naming. The softwares need to be made netbook friendly too.

 

[zithe]

I vote for the next project codename to be 'Spankie McSpank'

It's always 'Adjective + animal' for the names. Next one would have to start with an L. Yay for alliteration.

 

[Polaris573]

Ubuntu doesn't play nice with my system for some reason. I can't even get it to install without playing around with a bunch of stuff which is difficult for me in Linux. Fedora works great though so I'll stick with that.

 

[Gam'ster]

Nice ill look forward to it, im an avid user of 8.10 and love it.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

It's always 'Adjective + animal' for the names. Next one would have to start with an L. Yay for alliteration.

Leaping Hippo?

 

[zithe]

Leaping Hippo?

Both words have to be the same letter. Alliteration is a series of words starting with the same letter. Leaping Leopard or something.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

pfft who the hell came up with these naming schemes??? needs to be put down.

 

[blueskynis]

It's better then a number (eg. 7?)

 

[zithe]

Quadriplegic Quetzalcoatlus.

 

[AddSub]

Ubuntu doesn't play nice with my system for some reason. I can't even get it to install without playing around with a bunch of stuff which is difficult for me in Linux. Fedora works great though so I'll stick with that.

Same here. While Ubuntu is a decent distro, it is really not top of the line stuff even though it might seem so from the incessant propaganda floating on the internet. If you are looking for cutting edge hardware support and highest compatibility then Fedora is the natural choice. Ubuntu is popular with the hipster Mac crowd (well, at least it was few years ago) and that popularity helped it gain market-share. However, popularity has nothing to do with quality.

As for cloud computing and low-end netbooks, Linux is the natural choice and not just because of the obvious overhead issues when compared to Windows alternatives but there are serious licensing issues to be considered. Linux licensing is anywhere from free to extremely cheap and within short time we will see netbooks that cost less than $100. What is Microsoft going to do, offer their operating systems license-free? Not going to happen. And if it does, again, there is what I like to call "standard Windows overhead penalty" that is sure to be a major issue with any netbook maker.

 

[xfire]

For me its the other way round, Fedora doesn't play nice with my system. Ubuntu was thefirst distro that worked with my system. Almost everything works outof the box.

For the naming how about lesbian lady (humans are animals too)

 

[btarunr]

For me, the Ubuntu/Kubuntu installers don't play nice with my drives. Kubuntu almost broke my RAID 0 that holds my Windows installation, when installing it on a separate HDD. FC10 and OpenSuSE get away with some very simple yet hardware-friendly installers: RedHat Anaconda and SuSE YaST. I use FC10 as well. The installer was able to safely write GRUB onto my RAID 0 and mount the NTFS volume on it.

 

[Error 404]

My laptop is about as powerful as an EEE PC 701, so if Ubuntu can boot in 25 seconds on it I'll be happy! But only if it runs at the right resolution as well...

 

[freaksavior]

I vote for the next project codename to be 'Spankie McSpank'

lol i thought of when you said that

 

[Steevo]

Koalas that are disturbed are known to be violent, their teeth and claws capable of causing considerable injury to humans; special handling requirements are as such applicable.[

 

[xfire]

Koalas that are disturbed are known to be violent, their teeth and claws capable of causing considerable injury to humans; special handling requirements are as such applicable.[

So is M$

 

[mdm-adph]

I wish they'd stop using these internal programmer names publicly -- they sound ridiculous. :shadedshu

That being said...

Ubuntu doesn't play nice with my system for some reason. I can't even get it to install without playing around with a bunch of stuff which is difficult for me in Linux. Fedora works great though so I'll stick with that.

Could you be a bit more descriptive? I've been installing Ubuntu on computers for years now, and have gotten it to install on everything from late-model Macbooks to early Socket 7 motherboards -- doesn't always run great out of the box (what does?), but it'll at least install.

What was going on that was preventing you from even installing Ubuntu?

 

[blueskynis]

I have seen cases when Ubuntu can not boot from Live CD to graphical installer on some low end AMD boards with ATI integrated graphics. The only solution in that case was text based installer, after which everything worked.

 

[mdm-adph]

I have seen cases when Ubuntu can not boot from Live CD to graphical installer on some low end AMD boards with ATI integrated graphics. The only solution in that case was text based installer, after which everything worked.

Was that with a recent version of Ubuntu? Lately the display engine has been getting so bulletproof that it'll run at least a small display on anything I've seen...

 

[Polaris573]

I wish they'd stop using these internal programmer names publicly -- they sound ridiculous. :shadedshu

That being said...



Could you be a bit more descriptive? I've been installing Ubuntu on computers for years now, and have gotten it to install on everything from late-model Macbooks to early Socket 7 motherboards -- doesn't always run great out of the box (what does?), but it'll at least install.

What was going on that was preventing you from even installing Ubuntu?

I 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.