Indeed, while Red Hat dominates the data centre, every survey I’ve seen suggests that Ubuntu is still the dominant cloud OS, above RHEL, CentOS, and even Windows. This is the case for AWS, Rackspace, and other public cloud infrastructure. It’s also true of the market for public websites where Ubuntu also surpasses Red Hat.

Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux.

The release of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) hasn’t exactly made critics warm to Ubuntu’s Unity interface. However, Unity having gone through several versions, a definite tone of acceptance — or maybe resignation — colors discussion of the new release.

I’m confident that any version of Ubuntu released in the last five years will have absolutely no problem beating [Windows 8],” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. Of course, “after the success of Windows 7, this is Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,”

With an eye on corporate deployments of Linux desktops, Ubuntu 12.04 is also making it easier for enterprise users to access their non-Linux applications. VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Remote Desktop technologies are now all supported, providing Ubuntu 12.04 users with a way to access enterprise applications.

In kicking off the Ubuntu 12.10 development, GCC 4.7 is being uploaded to the Quantal repository to serve as the release’s default compiler. GCC 4.7.0 was out before the 12.04 LTS release, but the “Precise Pangolin” was shipping with the older GCC 4.6 series release.

For this particular end-user, given her usage parameters, she doesn’t need Windows or even a Mac. Ubuntu is an ideal solution. And yeah, I still hate the way Unity is currently implemented. But that doesn’t matter — it’s fine for the majority of end-users out there, and for my anxiety and acid reflux, it’s a [...]

Ubuntu 12.04 is upon us. Aside from the usual assortment of bug fixes and updated software, Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment has been polished and offers new features and more configurability. Precise Pangolin doesn’t include any dramatic changes, but it offers polish and refinement — while filling gaps in Unity.

The long-term support update, released on Thursday, adds more usability features and software management tools to the operating system. However, Ubuntu-backer Canonical is stressing the design changes in Precise Pangolin. These include its Unity interface, which has divided Ubuntu supporters, and its associated file-search tool, the Head-Up Display (HUD), described by Ubuntu Project founder Mark [...]

12.04 Precise Pangolin is the latest long-term support (LTS) release of the Linux-based operating system, and it is indeed a work of precision. Under the hood, bug fixing and performance improvements were the focus of the past six months. On the surface, Ubuntu has also undergone a major facelift since April 2010 when the last [...]

“We see huge interest in OpenStack right now, both from cloud providers and from private enterprises,” Chris Kenyon, VP of Sales and Business Development at Canonical, told me.

Join us as we speak to Canonical CEO, Jane Silber, about the community’s perception of arrogance, the fiery reception of Unity and Canonical’s plans to dominate much more than just your desktop…

Ubuntu (and its variants) took the top spot with room to spare—bringing in just over 51% of the overall vote. Behind it in second place was Linux Mint, with close to 16% of the votes cast, and hot on its heels in third was Arch Linux with just shy of 15% of the total vote

While you impatiently await the release of Precise Pangolin this Thursday, we’ve got some news to hold your little aubergine-loving heart over. Canonical’s own Mark Shuttleworth took to the web to announce Ubuntu 12.10, codenamed Quantal Quetzal.

“…..That kind of senseless user hostility is something that we’ve generally come away from (and some kernel people tend to dismiss Ubuntu, but I really think that Ubuntu has generally had the right approach, and been very user-centric).”

Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is making a big push into the enterprise and cloud, where it will go head to head with long-time enterprise Linux incumbent Red Hat and its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. However Shuttleworth is not sure that Red Hat’s pricing structure will make the firm competitive.

Shuttleworth continued, “It’s absolutely true we have no interest in the core fundamentals of the Linux kernel, none whatsoever. The Linux kernel was flying before Ubuntu was founded, what was missing at the time was the commitment to the end user experience, the quality of the whole integration that Ubuntu essentially brought. I don’t think [...]

Back at the last UDS Orlando summit I mentioned that Canonical was looking at finally recomending the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux by default for new installs rather than 32-bit. This issue is again being discussed at the last minute for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release due out next week.

Windows is great, but after a while, it can get cluttered up with too many programs and become intolerably sluggish. Backing up your files and reinstalling it can help, but an alternative is to try the free Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu isn’t too demanding and can make even a lowly netbook seem sprightly compared with [...]

Ubuntu 12.04, the Precise Pangolin, is scheduled to be released in a little over a week. This is a very exciting release for us, not only is it an LTS release with 5 years of support, but it also brings some major improvements to Unity and other areas of the desktop. It’s also going to [...]

Linux fans are excited about Ubuntu’s forthcoming long-term service desktop release, Ubuntu 12.04. That’s all well and good. After all Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company hopes 20-million of you will buy Ubuntu PCs in the coming twelve months. But, Ubuntu also wants to be your Linux of choice for your cloud and data center.

Crawling the job posting boards over at Canonical turns up a pretty interesting position, one for a Business Development Manager (Ubuntu Phone OS). Now, we’re not quite ready to jump to any conclusions here, but the wording of the listing is quite intriguing.

In less than two weeks, the latest version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin, will be released. This new Ubuntu is looking good. How good? In a recent interview with Julie Bort, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said, “We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.”

Canonical – some testers and industry watchers alike have praised the company’s innovative Unity desktop shell and the Heads Up Display (HUD) bolted on top of it in this month’s release of Ubuntu 12.04, the Precise Pangolin. But that praise is not universal. Others have criticized Canonical’s drastic changes for further fracturing the thread that [...]

While recent testing has shown how Ubuntu 12.04 LTS KVM/Xen/VirtualBox virtualization compares between Intel’s Sandy Bridge and AMD’s Bulldozer platforms, in this article is a different look at the KVM virtualization performance of the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system. In this review is a look at the KVM virtualization performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS [...]

Over the years there have been no shortage of articles where people try switching to Ubuntu (or other distro) for some period of time, to see if they can use it as a replacement for Windows. Some are happy with the results, but many have a hard time with the move.

I was curious what Linus Torvalds and Greg KH, the two leaders of the Linux world, think of Canonical’s contribution. During LinuxCon when I asked Linus Torvalds about the players who do not contribute back he said, “When you have people who just use the system, they don’t necessarily give that much back because they [...]

Mark Shuttleworth has announced MAAS, Metal-as-a-Service, a tool for “hyperscale” deployments. The idea behind MAAS is that, as data centres move towards thousands of lower-power processor nodes, there should be an easier way to provision the “bare-metal” of these nodes with the required operating system and applications.

Similar to the mixed boot performance results for Ubuntu 12.04, the power consumption results are also mixed. For some hardware, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most power efficient Ubuntu Linux release in recent history while for some other hardware the Precise Pangolin is continuing in a power binge.

Ubuntu 12.04 has a number of challenges to overcome before we think it’s ready for the planned LTS release later this month. We kick off a irreverent list with a few gripes about Unity and the Dash…