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Posts tagged with '13.04'

Ben Howard

Windows Azure Cloud Image Dailies

May 2, 2013

by Ben Howard

Under 12.04 12.04.2 12.10 , 13.04 , 13.10 , azure , canonical , ubuntu , utlemming

Over the course of working with Microsoft on Windows Azure, we have had the goal of bringing the same experience on Azure as our users have on EC2. As part of our QA process, we publish daily images (http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com) for EC2 and OpenStack users.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Windows Azure Cloud Image dailies are now being published for Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS, 12.10, 13.04 and the current development version 13.10. Due to the way that Windows Azure image publication works, these images will appear with in a three or four hours of the EC2 images and will be published to all Windows Azure regions.

However, the daily images will not be available in the Windows Azure Gallery; these images are published to API users. In the coming weeks, we'll throw up some pages to help our API users find the current images, but for now, you can use the API Query tools to find the images.

The initial daily images are:

Ubuntu_DAILY_BUILD-precise-12_04_2-LTS-amd64-server-20130502-en-us-30GB
Ubuntu_DAILY_BUILD-raring-13_04-amd64-server-20130501-en-us-30GB
Ubuntu_DAILY_BUILD-saucy-13_10-amd64-server-20130502-en-us-30GB

As you can see, daily builds are clearly marked as "DAILY_BUILD" and include both the code name and the version number. Canonical provided images are all prefixed with our publisher GUUID of "b39f27a8b8c64d52b05eac6a62ebad85__"

While we make every effort at maintaining quality, daily images are not officially supported and may have issues as they are not rigorously QA'ed. As part of our release process, we take a daily, put it through QA and then promote the image. If you see any problems with any of the daily builds, please head over to Launchpad.net and file us a bug.

For those who need a primer on using the Azure CLI Tool, our friends over at Microsoft have a really good explanation here. After you get it all setup, you should see all versions of the released Ubuntu Cloud Images and the dailies.

Finally, our daily image publishing will be restricted to the last five images for any one series. Like on EC2, all versions of Ubuntu Server released Cloud Images will remain indefinitely, with the exception of the pre-Windows Azure GA images (i.e. images with a serial of less than 20130414).

ssweeny

Raring Ringtail Released!

April 26, 2013

by ssweeny

Under 13.04 , canonical , computer geekery , raring ringtail , ubuntu | Comment

Raring to go.

Congratulations to the Ubuntu team on another great release! Of course I repeat myself.

I’ve been really impressed with the performance en-slickening in 13.04. It really snaps on my desktop, laptop… and Nexus 7

As usual, you can take a tour online, or just go grab it!

Ben Howard

Vagrant image updates - Chef, Puppet, Juju, 13.04 works and error message fix

March 18, 2013

by Ben Howard

Under 12.04 , 12.10 , 13.04 , canonical , ubuntu , utlemming , vagrant

Shortly after introducing the Vagrant images, a number of users provided very valuable feedback. The general gist was "sure this is a nice, but useless." For Cloud Images, we definitely take our user feedback to heart.

The 12.10 and 13.04 images now include Chef, Puppet and Juju clients. Also, the 13.04 images work now that the annoying Virtualbox installation error has been fixed. Users report that Chef and Chef Solo provisioning work with out any problems.

For 12.04, providing Chef support is somewhat more difficult as there are no official Ubuntu provided versions of Chef. Policy restricts us from providing third-party software on any image hosted on ubuntu.com. However, 12.04 does include Puppet and Juju.

The inclusion of Juju was added at the request of Juju charmers. In a future blog post, I'll illustrate how to use Vagrant for Juju charm development.

Finally, a common query that I get is about this particular error message:

[default] No guest additions were detected on the base box for this VM! Guest

additions are required for forwarded ports, shared folders, host only

networking, and more. If SSH fails on this machine, please install

the guest additions and repackage the box to continue.

This is not an error message; everything may continue to work properly,

in which case you may ignore this message.

I came up a nice long explanation as to the root cause (tl;dr: the Vagrant Cloud Images are _never_ booted and therefore the agent doesn't report to VirtualBox its information). And then the engineer in me started to think that this might be a trivial fix. Anyhow, in the next few days, this ugly error message will disappear for our daily builds (for Raring the message is gone as of today).

In conclusion, I wanted to say thank you to all the people who have dropped me an email for feature requests, rants and feedback. As always please feel to drop me a line, and I'll take a look at making these better.

Daniel Holbach

What’s going on with the Nexus 7?

December 17, 2012

by Daniel Holbach

Under 13.04 , memory , nexus7 , raring , ubuntu | Comment

Raring!

Many have asked me what’s been going on with the work on Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 recently. A lot of people put work into getting the raring images ready for public consumption. 12.10 worked great on the Nexus, but there were a few blockers on getting 13.04 to work as well. On this road among other things these issues were fixed:

A new onboard pre-release made it into 13.04 which fixes many bugs already and makes our on-screen keyboard a lot easier to use. Thanks a lot to the onboard team.
The new Unity stack got into raring, which is now automatically tested after commits and auto-released into 13.04. This is a huge milestone from the Unity team. Among the issues fixed was a nux problem, which constituted a blocker.
The new raring images use oem-config to present us with an installer window, where you can specify a user name, the wireless network you want to use and other bits.
Many many other issues were fixed as well.

Ubuntu on the Nexus 7

So what does this mean for you now? You can now very easily put Ubuntu 13.04 on your Nexus 7. It won’t need any additional PPA, it’s stock raring, you won’t have to reflash, but can just do your regular updates and enjoy the latest and greatest improvements day by day.

This is a huge achievement and will allow us to do better and more immediate testing and hacking on the device.

Hacking

One thing we want to improve on the Nexus 7 (and in Ubuntu in general) is memory consumption. Alex Chiang has put together some great blog posts on how to help with finding memory issues and debugging them. They are absolutely worth a read and an effort worth getting involved with. Here are the links:

If you want to make Ubuntu better and have a bit of a development background, be sure to check them out.

Meeting the team

Everybody who has been working on Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 has documented things on the wiki pages, so if you are excited about this, be sure head there first. Also does the team hang out in 24/7 in #ubuntu-arm on irc.freenode.net, so feel free to drop by, say Hi and get to know the others.

These are exciting times for Ubuntu and you can be part of it.