In other news from the summit, Ubuntu developers are planning to fork the GNOME Control Center to create their own Ubuntu Control Center package. Other than GNOME Shell, it is planned that the installation CD for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” will include almost all core components of GNOME 3.6, including Clutter.

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.

I decided it was time to scrutinise the latest version of Unity running on the latest version of the OS. Some of the observations that follow relate to new features and some to features already present in Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier versions.

Dell has launched an experimental project called Sputnik to produce a Linux laptop that is tailored to meet the needs of software developers. The first stage of the project is a six-month exploratory effort that will pair Dell’s XPS13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04.

There was a very interesting session at UDS by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google’s customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers.

It appears that Unity 2D — the Qt non-accelerated desktop version of the Ubuntu Unity desktop — will be abandoned by Canonical. There’s also going to be some GNOME 3.6 packages appearing in Ubuntu 12.10.

Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It’s peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it’s still too limited and [...]

In a rather unexpected move, Electronic Arts has added two web-based game titles to the Ubuntu Software Center of the popular Linux distribution, and although they’re far from the newest games, Linux users will likely welcome Command and Conquer Tiberium Alliances as well as the Lord of Ultima with open arms.

CANADIAN LINUX VENDOR Canonical has pulled out all the stops with Ubuntu 12.04 to get enterprises to give its Linux operating system a go, and on the whole it succeeds, even if some features might put off traditional users.

Through its Project Sputnik, Dell has been working on a prototype open source laptop aimed at developers, based on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” and Dell’s XPS 13 hardware.

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.

2012 has already seen a major update of what’s arguably the most important Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 and we’re also seeing the most radical update of Windows with Windows 8 Metro coming since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1. So, which will end up the better for its change?

This is the first in a line of tutorials I am working on for less experienced linux users to effectively use their VPS. I’ve been tinkering with a little script that some of you might find helpful, it’s designed to install LXDE and NoMachine on a fresh VPS installation.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use [...]

The recent release of the BI Publisher Trial Edition (see here) we state support for Linux but to be fair, we narrow that down to Oracle Linux Redhat and SLES. OK, but as its so lightweight it would be great to be able to fire it up on my laptop without the need for a [...]

This tutorial shows how to prepare an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) server (with nginx, BIND, Dovecot) for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache or nginx web server, Postfix mail [...]

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 264 for the week April 30 – May 6, 2012.

The new version of Ubuntu–12.04, codename “Precise Pangolin”– is officially here, meaning two things: I get to be really happy about new features, and some people get to complain about Unity in the comments. Horray!

Ubuntu has been one of the top two distributions in Linux for a very long time, yet this is the first time I have really used Ubuntu for more than a week. I prefer Linux Mint, which is derived from Ubuntu.

Here’s the first shot at using a USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapter with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Free of charge, free of viruses and designed to outpace its rivals on low-end systems – Ubuntu has some obvious advantages.

These removal commands were created based on what Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. packages were added to a default Ubuntu installation. It’s possible that the commands might remove some other packages you have since added to the default and want to keep. If that’s the case, keep track of which packages those are and reinstall them.

Here’s a comparison of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS versus Microsoft Windows 7 performance when it comes to using Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors with integrated graphics. While the Sandy Bridge graphics performance was once faster when it came to OpenGL with the open-source Linux driver, that’s no longer the case.

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.

Strong sales of the iPhone 4S are putting renewed pressure on Android to innovate. Ubuntu for Android could give the platform a key capability iPhone is still missing.

As with most cloud hosts, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers only Secure Shell (SSH) access by default to Linux cloud servers. But if you aren’t a command-line fan or your application requires a GUI, you can set up remote desktop access to most Linux cloud servers.

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,”

Also with an eye to the future, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on Tuesday spent an hour answering questions about what else is coming down the pike for Ubuntu in version 12.10 and beyond. As part of Ubuntu Open Week this week, Shuttleworth’s “Ask Mark” session offered a compelling glimpse at what’s to come.

Recently a number of the Hyper-V drivers for Linux made it into the main kernel branch. This means that native support for Hyper-V is starting to turn up in a number of Linux distributions. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is an example of a new Linux release with Hyper-V support “out of the box”.

Ubuntu 12.04 has been officially released and, with minor adjustments, the intel gma500 video card is working out of the box. See the last part of this post for suggestions on getting suspend working.