Ubuntu

Consider this a Thanksgiving post. I know most of you are away eating, or arguing with family. Up here, in the Great White North, Thanksgiving was back in early October so I'm sort of working today. You might say I'm indulging in a different kind of bird. Just what kind of bird, however, was something I was very curious about.

Like many others, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy of the new killer OS from Google. I wanted to try it out. Kick the tires. Take it for a spin. That sort of thing.

So I downloaded the VMware image on the site and saved it to my disk, then created a virtual machine inside VirtualBox using the VMDK image as the disk file. Then I booted it and started looking around. It took me about 20 seconds to figure out that the login was my GMail user name and password and I was off.

Read the complete post over at the Ubuntu User Website.

Hear that clock ticking? There are only nine days left to the release of Ubuntu 9.10. It's all very exciting and that excitement was bouncing about inside my brain as I drove my son to school this morning. A little ditty was echoing in my mind along with what I might write about the big event, when suddenly it hit me. No, not another car. I was paying attention. What hit me was a fully formed vision of the future, nine days hence. Sort of like what happens on FlashForward, the series based on Robert J. Sawyer's book. Except I didn't black out. I started telling what I saw in my vision to my five year old son who, sitting quietly in the back seat, quietly ignored me.

Read the whole story on the Ubuntu User Website.

I'd like to begin by apologizing for the complete lack of controversy in today's post. I appreciate your understanding in this difficult time when I am finding it hard to really get upset about anything. But I digress.

Pick up issue #2 of Ubuntu User magazine, open it to page 16, and you'll find an article titled "Cloud View" (by yours truly), the focus of which is Canonical's new offering, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. You'll find stories hyping this for the upcoming release of Karmic Koala (a mere 14 days away as I write this) but the framework, or a technical preview thereof, was available in Ubuntu 9.04. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with Eucalyptus Systems, a company that has created an open source implementation of Amazin's EC2, or Elastic Cloud Services.

I mention this now for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm going to chat a little more about cloud computing. The second reason is that a lot has already changed since the release of my article in Ubuntu User #2.

Read the whole story on the Ubuntu User Website.