Comments on: Linaro at work: porting, testing, and Android

By: Zac

Zac — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 06:46:35 +0000

I agree with hansioux above. The Software Centre is very important for uses and developers. I hope more work gets focussed on the Software Centre. This is one of the central pillars for growth.

Thanks for another great year of your effort. Keep those changes coming and make Ubuntu the best OS for desktop, netbooks, tablets, and phones. It can be done. Keep pluggin’ away.

By: bcbc

bcbc — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:44:00 +0000

That sounds exciting. Particularly the part about rigorous, repeatable testing. This is one area that is very conspicuous by its absence in other critical parts of Ubuntu – e.g. Grub2. There also appears to be an imbalance in developer focus to preparing for upcoming releases, rather than maintaining existing releases (to the detriment of the existing userbase). It’s great to anticipate what’s coming, but if you look after your current user base (and especially new users), that will ensure a faster growth to achieve what Ubuntu deserves.

By: hansioux

hansioux — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:16:08 +0000

Mark, after seeing the recent trend fro mobile devices, I feel the future of OS depends on its ability to bring apps to its users. What attracts developers are:
1. how many users they can reach.
2. how easy is it to port to/from other platforms/devices.
3. how easy is the publication process.

If it simply is a pain to do the second 2, sometimes devs don’t even care if they are missing a huge market. The more devs willing to write for your application distribution platform, the more apps for the users, thus the OS gets more users.

I see this trend coming to the desktop OS platforms as well. Even though Ubuntu is on the right track with its software center, I feel that some directions are still stuck in traditional view points. Currently the process of getting paid software into the software center is long and difficult, it’s new, i understand. but just getting things working on launchpad and getting a PPA isn’t all that easy/well documented. And the software center should be available to other distros if their users so choose to install it, and get apps from there.

Therefore, being able to compile the code into different Package Managers (deb/rpm/), and for different architectures (32bit/64bit) on launchpad will allow devs to reach maximum linux user base, thus attracting more developers and more apps. It’s a page from OpenSuse’s play book, but they are really aiming to do just that, especially now they are developing their own software center.

ubuntu seems to have a great vision of how the linux desktop experience can be, keep on the good work at canonical.

By: T. J. Brumfield

T. J. Brumfield — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:08:52 +0000

I still think Canonical should buy SUSE. Novell was just sold, but I don’t know if Attachmate wanted the Linux division particularly.

It sounds crazy to suggest because I hate a lot of things about Ubuntu and love SUSE, but I think it would be a marriage made in heaven.

Ubuntu is really trying to innovate and change desktop paradigms. They’re making serious in-roads, and OEMs are willing to deal with Ubuntu.

That being said they are too bleeding edge to be taken seriously in the server/enterprise department, they have poor QA, they treat KDE as a bastard stepchild, and they don’t push enough code upstream.

SUSE has great engineers, pushes tons of great code upstream, has a great server product, has good QA and puts out a great KDE desktop.

You’d get the best of Ubuntu’s package manager, and SUSE’s fantastic Yast tools. Canonical would also pick up SUSE’s SUSE Studio and the Open Build Service.

I think you could capture the desktop market with Ubuntu’s music store, cloud storage, etc. and the enterprise server market by leveraging Novell/SUSE’s good name with SLED.

Tell me you wouldn’t want to run a desktop that merged the best features of Ubuntu and openSUSE.

By: enedene

enedene — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:30:09 +0000

I’ve seen that Jolicloud has pushed their own netbook, which is great.
Then someone on site OMG Ubuntu suggested that it would be great to have an Ubuntu laptop/netbook.
I couldn’t agree more. Dell is selling some Ubuntu laptops, but they are practically ashamed, it’s really hard to find a Ubuntu laptop on their web site let alone in practice in shops.
Is there any chance that Canonical/Ubuntu will try to ship their own laptops/netbooks, something like Mac does? Is there enough market to make it profitable?

@GNU Google is nothing like Microsoft, quite the opposite.

By: Androidiani: Il progetto Linaro | android, drivers, kernel, linaro, linux, open source

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:15:26 +0000

[...] considerazioni dopo il rilascio da parte di Mak Shuttleworth (fondatore della Ubuntu Foundation) [...]

By: Linaro faz avançar Linux nos dispositivos ARM | ZWAME Portal

Linaro faz avançar Linux nos dispositivos ARM | ZWAME Portal — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:52:49 +0000

[...] haver pela proximidade com o Ubuntu. Aliás o que me chamou a atenção foi uma entrada no blog do Mark Shuttleworth e perceber que tem havido colaboração com o Ubuntu e que para o próximo ciclo de desenvolvimento [...]

By: A. Peon

A. Peon — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:45:06 +0000

Any chance for an Android environment ‘hosted’ on a Ubuntu environment, for the best of both worlds as far as that goes?

By: foo

foo — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:40:54 +0000

Why are they targeting such an old version of GCC?? Are they falling into the standard Ubuntu trap of not contributing upstream?

By: Leon Bogaert

Leon Bogaert — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 19:39:41 +0000

Sounds interesting. When I get my pandaboard I’ll have a look at Linaro.