Ubuntu...why are you so newsworthy this week....

There are a bunch of different stories around one of our favorite Linux Distros this week.  In the podcast we talked about Shuttleworth saying he is thinking about dropping Firefox for Chrome.  As with most things like this we don't think it's a big deal because you can always just install Firefox after you have installed the machine.  We also talked about Matt Asay's article in the Register giving them a hard time about still chasing the declining Netbook market.  We agree and think they could be spending their time in better ways.  Canonical seems to be spreading itself extremely thin.  From Cloud plays to Netbooks to Music stores all seems a bit much.  We are sure they will work it out but a little focus would just make it all happen faster.

Episode 45 - Cloudy with a chance of conectivity...

Running Time: 49:30

1) Introduction

Joe and Brian Talk about stuff(We love the Narwhals song at this link, Natty is out, PSN is still down, and other off topic stuff)

2) News

Purple Reign - IBM and Red Hat hook up to take on VMWare

Canonical changes it’s cloud strategy...And Linux Mint 11 opts for Gnome 2.x rather than Gnome 3.x/Unity

Fedora and Ubuntu working on Brtfs support may give the ability to do virtualized like snapshots on systems that aren’t virtual...

Google VP says cloud is at the same point E-Mail was in the late 1980's

3) Conclusion

Recommendations for People to interview

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Fedora and Ubuntu are getting the Butter on our File systems...

Phoronix.com, a great site with an even better preformance test suite, has a nice write up about the often talked about BRTFS(commonly pronounced Butter FS). They mention that Fedora seems to be releasing it with GRUB extenstions to allow for file system snapshot roll-backs by the end of the year and Ubuntu by the 12.04 release next April.  What is so great about this?  Imagine if your favorite Linux Update tool could tell BRTFS to take a snapshot of the state of the file systems every time it did an update.  Then let's imagine that GRUB, our favorite boot-loader, could see that they were al there and give you the options to roll-back to that last know working version.  Wouldn't that just ROCK?  No more worries about not taking snapshots on virtual machines or needing to restore after a bad upgrade on a physical machine.  The time saved will be incredible.  We can't wait for this all to be production ready and standard on all Linux versions.

With it's second pick in the cloud draft Ubuntu chooses OpenStack...

Over at Desktoplinux.com they have a story about Canonical's annoucement that they have decided to go in a new direction with their cloud offering.  Instead of using Eucalyptus they will be migrating to OpenStack.  This will also mean that instead of supporting a E2C API they will be switching to the OpenStack API.  This means very little for most people but if you were thinking about building a private cloud with Ubuntu's solution it is a pretty significant switch. In our opinion OpenStack is the better choice for both you and Ubuntu.  The project has huge backers like NASA, RackSpace, Dell, Cisco and intel to name a few.  It's also gained a lot of momentum.  If you have looked at it check it out here.

Ubuntu strikes a big deal in Germany...

Ubuntu struck a deal with one of Germany's largest insurance companies to install 10,000 Ubuntu Based PC's.  The feat was made possible partially because of the companies use of Java Software to manage claims information.  The company had also standardized on Linux friendly software like Lotus Notes, Adobe Reader and OpenOffice.  This is a great win for Ubuntu and Linux on the desktop.  Hopefully they will write some white papers about what they did and how they overcame the problems they encountered along the way.

So my quesiton for everyone.  What percentage of your company could switch over the Linux on their desktop?