The emergence of public cloud computing has changed the IT landscape for developers and enterprises, making it significantly easier and more cost effective to develop and deploy new applications, services and infrastructure. Enterprises can choose among cloud providers to meet their needs for performance, features, price and flexibility that will support their technology strategy today as well as in the future.

Today, Microsoft Corp. has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, its public cloud offering with the ability to create and manage both Windows and Linux virtual machines. As part of Canonical’s Certified Public Cloud Program, Ubuntu on Windows Azure is fully certified and has been tested and optimized by Canonical and Microsoft for excellent performance and reliability. Enterprises that require both Windows and Linux can choose the right operating system for running their workloads based on application performance and availability.

Canonical and Microsoft have been working together to make Ubuntu run seamlessly on Windows Azure. As Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft commented:

“Windows Azure is committed to openness and interoperability. Having Ubuntu available to Windows Azure users is a big step forward for interoperability in the public cloud. Our customers can deploy mission critical applications on both Windows Server and Linux and across both public and private clouds.”

Ubuntu Server is highly available, secure, built for scale and provides the tools that simplify and reduce the cost of cloud deployments. So, for enterprises looking to deploy demanding cloud oriented workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and other scale out type applications,  Ubuntu on Windows Azure will be a familiar and well suited offering that provides maximum deployment flexibility. This includes hybrid clouds where applications and data can remain behind the company firewall for security or compliance reasons, and that are able to access public cloud resources on demand.  As the leading guest OS in most major public clouds, Ubuntu can be deployed across multiple public clouds at scale for pricing and redundancy benefits as well as avoiding lock-in to a single cloud provider.

At Canonical, we invest in the Ubuntu experience to provide the most complete combination of performance, update handling, compliance and reliability in the market. We also extend our commercial offerings of support, systems management, audit compliance and IP assurance to commercial customers using Ubuntu on certified public clouds.

Today we announced a collaborative support and engineering agreement with Dell.  As part of this agreement Canonical will add Dell 11G & 12G PowerEdge models to the Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS Certification List and Dell will add Ubuntu Server to its Linux OS Support Matrix.

In May 2012, Dell launched the OpenStack Cloud Reference Architecture using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on select PowerEdge-C series servers. Today’s announcement expands upon that offering by combining the benefits of Ubuntu Server Certification, Ubuntu Advantage enterprise support, and Dell Hardware ProSupport across the PowerEdge line.

Dell customers can now deploy with confidence when purchasing Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Hardware ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage.  When these customers call into Dell, their service tag numbers will be entitled with ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage, which will create a seamless support experience via the collaborative Dell and Canonical support and engineering relationship.

In preparation for this announcement, Canonical engineers worked with Dell to enable and validate Ubuntu Server running on Dell PowerEdge Servers.  This work resulted in improved Ubuntu Server on Dell PowerEdge support for PCIe SSD (solid state drives), 4K-block drives, EFI booting, Web Services Management, consistent network device naming, and PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controllers).

Dell hardware systems management can be done out-of-band via ipmi, iDRAC, and the Lifecycle Controller.  Dell OMSA Ubuntu packages are also available but it is recommended to use the supported out-of-band systems management tools.  Dell TechCenter is a good resource for additional technical information about running Ubuntu Server on Dell PowerEdge servers.

If you are interested in purchasing Ubuntu Advantage for your Dell PowerEdge servers, please contact the Dell Solutions team at Canonical.  If your business is already using or thinking about using a supported Ubuntu Server infrastructure in your data-center then be sure to fill out the annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey to provide additional feedback.

Ubuntu Phone OS integrates with Orange and Deutsche Telekom in GSMA OneAPI initiative

Mobile World Congress kicks off today and we’re gearing up to show off Ubuntu running on multiple devices. We’ll be demonstrating phones, tablets and desktops at the stand, have Ubuntu developers flashing spare hardware, as well as be showing integration and interoperability with Orange and Deutsche Telekom through the GSMA’s One API initiative.

GSMA’s OneAPI initiative aims to provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable applications to exploit mobile network capabilities, such as messaging, authentication, payments and location-finding with a cross-operator reach. For example, a payment network API could be used to add an in-app purchase directly to the user’s mobile phone bill.

Ubuntu is the first smartphone operating system to be able to demonstrate integration and interoperability with a carrier’s authentication and billing systems. Working with Deutsche Telekom and Orange, we’ll show how a single API can be used to instantly log users in with their operator identity and seamlessly link that with Ubuntu One, Ubuntu’s identity and payments services, and provide carrier billing options upon purchase of music and eventually, apps.

This is a massive step forward for the industry as the GSMA and partners such as Canonical, are spearheading an initiative to standardise access to operator facilities via network APIs across all operators. The initiative will benefit operators, developers and consumers:

• It puts operators in a position to forge stronger relationships with their customers.
• For developers, OneAPI reduces the time and effort needed to create applications for and content that is portable across mobile operators, increasing reach and ultimately enhancing the consumer experience.
• For consumers, it makes it really quick and easy to make application purchases directly from their phone. It’s also more secure because it’s not necessary to input credit card details for each purchase.

Also at Mobile World Congress:

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, will participate in a keynote panel discussion alongside Mozilla and Tizen on Tuesday 26th Feb at 18.00 at the MWC Conference Auditorium and broadcast live on Mobile World Live
• We’ll be taking part in the App Developer Day on Tuesday 26th Feb. Stuart Langridge, technical architect at Canonical will be presenting the Ubuntu phone, SDK, HTML5 and native apps as well as discussing app development for Ubuntu on phones and tablets. We’ll also have engineers available at the event to flash spare handsets with Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu. This will take place from 9.00-9.30 and 11.40-11.55, and 13.30-14.00 in Hall 8.0, Theatre A.
• The GSMA Seminar on “Unlocking Value with Network APIs” will run on Thursday 28th from 9am to 10.30 am in Room CC1.1. Canonical’s Stuart Langridge will present and demo the Ubuntu Phone during the session. We’ll also be demonstrating Ubuntu’s OneAPI solution at the GSMA stand daily.
• Look out for Ubuntu engineers who will flash spare hardware with developer images for phone and tablet throughout the show close to the Ubuntu stand.

Starting today, users can install the Steam Client with a few simple clicks in our Software Center, the fastest and safest way to install thousands of paid and free applications on Ubuntu. Canonical and Valve have worked closely together to make Ubuntu the best performing open platform for gaming and now the ultimate entertainment platform is fully supported.

To celebrate this release Steam has every Ubuntu title on sale for 50-75% off until Thursday, 21 February at 10:00am US Pacific time in what is the first of many Steam sales. Steam also brings with it some amazing Valve titles on Ubuntu, Half-Life, Counter-Strike and the free to play Team Fortress 2. As a launch giveaway and for the hardcore gamers who need every item in Team Fortress, for a limited time when you play Team Fortress 2 on Ubuntu you will get a Tux penguin item to keep or trade.

We welcome all the new Steam users who can now upgrade to Ubuntu. Steam Big Picture running on your Ubuntu computer connected to the living room TV is a great way to experience the future today. Canonical looks forward to the steady progress of games from all our partners on Ubuntu on the desktop and soon on the Ubuntu phone and tablet in due course.

We are exhibiting at this year’s CeBIT event on March 5-9th, 2013 in Hannover Germany, in conjunction with our partner in the region, Teuto.net and we’re giving away number of free tickets to selected customers and partners. If you are interested in one of these tickets, please contact me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com for more information.

The Canonical/Teuto.net stand will be in the Open Source Arena (Hall 6, Stand F16, (030) and we will be showcasing two enterprise technology areas:

• The Ubuntu Cloud Stack – demonstrating end user access to applications via an OpenStack cloud, powered by Ubuntu,
• Ubuntu Landscape Systems Management – demonstrating ease of management of desktop, server and cloud nodes.

We will be running hourly demonstrations on our stand and attendees have the chance to win a Google Nexus 7 tablet! Simply come to out stand and watch a short demo or your chance to win If you would like to pre-register for a demonstration, email me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

CeBIT draws a live audience of more than 3,000 people from over 100 different countries. In just five days the show delivers a panoramic view of the digital world’s mainstay markets: ICT and Telecommunications, Digital Media also Consumer Electronics.
To learn more about CeBIT click here.

The Ubuntu 12.10 release saw the Dash take another important step towards fulfilling its intended purpose of being an online, global search tool that helps users find anything, instantly, right from their home environment. There are a number of exciting improvements planned for 13.04 that will make the Dash more comprehensive, more online and as a result – slicker and even more useful. Here’s a snapshot of what is likely to land in the next release:

Smart Scopes – Scopes are the daemons capable of presenting local or remote information right in the Dash. In 13.04, we will increase the number of scopes installed by default in Ubuntu (including many existing community developed scopes) and introduce the ability to automatically light up the right ones based on their relevancy to a user’s search query. For example, a search for “The Beatles” is likely to trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that will contain local and online sources – with the online sources querying your personal cloud as well as other free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, etc. To achieve this, the Dash will call a new smart scope service which will return ranked online search results, which the Dash will then balance against local results to return the most relevant information to the user. Scopes are becoming a really interesting contribution area for our developer community – and we can’t wait to see what people will submit to make the Dash an even richer experience.

Instant Purchasing – being able to purchase music or apps directly from the Dash, without opening a browser or a separate client. In 13.04, we expect to enable instant payments, powered by Ubuntu One, for both applications from the Software Center and music from the Music Store – to deliver the fastest possible purchasing experience directly from the Dash.

More Suggestions and User Controls – the More Suggestions scope, which currently returns relevant commercial content available from the Ubuntu One Music Store and Amazon, will expand to include more retailers. We are also testing a few additional user controls like filters for local and global searching – more to come on this front as we learn from those sessions. In the meantime, users can already focus a search to local files only with a simple super-f keystroke.

There are several principles around the Dash that are also worth reiterating:

Its raison d’etre is to provide Ubuntu users the fastest, slickest way to find things right from their home environment – independent of whether those “things” are on your machine, available online, free or commercial.  The music and video lenses in the Dash have queried online sources since their introduction, and we will continue to expand our online sources over the next releases. Our testing has overwhelmingly shown that this integrated and unified search feature is the best experience for the vast majority of users – and the best user experience will always be included as a default on Ubuntu.

 
Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users.  We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.

Onwards and upwards.

Another selection of mobile games from the Humble Bundle has been released with the fourth installment of the Humble Bundle for Android. As always we have awesome Ubuntu Desktop debuts: Splice, Walking Mars, Machinarium, and Crayon Physics Deluxe all now available in Ubuntu Software Center which is the easiest way to download and receive game updates on Ubuntu. Not only can you pay what you want for every DRM-free game on Ubuntu, support charity and redeem with Software Center, you can play the games on your mobile phone. This Bundle is a great way to pick up an Android versions of an Ubuntu favorite Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery. The “Beat the Average” game, Machinarium, is a must play game that challenges and entertains simultaneously.

One Note The Eufloria developers want to focus on Humble Bundle support and polishing before they start selling in the Ubuntu Software Center. That is why Eufloria is set at a unobtainum price, get a copy while you can as part of the bundle. The bundle should tide your gaming needs as the Steam beta from Valve that started this week for Ubuntu rolls out to a wider audience, thanks for playing.

OpenStack, your foundation for Cloud computing

14 November 2012 at 4pm GMT

The open cloud, based on OpenStack, is fast becoming one of the most popular cloud platforms. OpenStack delivers open standards, modularity and scalability, and avoids vendor lock-in.

Join this webinar to find out why OpenStack is surging ahead, learn about the OpenStack technical architecture and the new features of the recent Folsom release. Find out why, to date, all public cloud providers, such as DreamHost and HP, whom are using OpenStack, are deploying it on ubuntu.

You will also learn about investments that Canonical has made into OpenStack such a as our Continuous Integration efforts, the Ubuntu Cloud Archive and Ceilometer.

Register now

If you’re considering the adoption of new technology in your business, there’s a new resource launching today that could give you everything you need to make the right decisions in what can be confusing and sometimes costly field.

With sections on the desktop, server and the hot topic of the moment – cloud computing – it offers useful content for business people of all kinds, regardless of how technical their background might be. It features contributions from IT experts across the Canonical departments, with content available in several formats.
Here are just some of the highlights on the site right now:

• Cloud and the Enterprise Data Center: Everything Changes – a free ebook that sets out to make the cloud as straightforward as possible.
• Open Cloud Computing: Mergers and Acquisitions – a fascinating article on how open standards in cloud computing are vital when combining the operations of more than one business.
• Windows 8 Migration – Let’s Open the Debate – the first article in a series looking at the pros and cons of upgrading business PCs to Microsoft’s controversial new operating system, Windows 8.

Ubuntu Insights is aimed at business people who may not have a technology background, but who are increasingly faced with decisions that involve enterprise computing. We hope it will be useful to you or to some of your colleagues so, if you know of someone who could use a good introduction to the field, please share the link. And we’re always on the look-out for contributors, so if you have any content you’d like to contribute to the site, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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The  “More suggestions” feature (aka the shopping lens) in the Ubuntu 12.10 release, brings the Dash a few steps closer to becoming that go to place for immediate access to “stuff” – whether it resides on the device, in the cloud or is available for purchase online. This mix of personal and commercially available content is still a research area for a number of major platform and online services companies, so in 12.10 we’ll be breaking new ground. And as it happens when you break new ground, we’re bound to get some things wrong at the start. As such, we’ve been furiously sorting through user feedback, and this has helped us focus our efforts on quickly tackling some of the deficiencies introduced a few weeks back.

On Privacy – Communication between client and server has been encrypted by serving results over HTTPS, which went live on September 28th. This has introduced some latency to our search-as-you-type implementation and we’ll be optimizing it over the next several months. Fetching of images is still happening directly from 7digital and Amazon as immediate solutions are either inadequate or unavailable via the Amazon API (such as the suggested ssl-images-amazon.com), so this is an area still requiring attention. Over the next cycle, we will be looking at replicating the solution we already have when searching the Ubuntu One Music Store from the web, which is to proxy images from our servers. We are adding a legal privacy notice to the dash and this will be easily accessible to all users. For reiterated clarity, we have no intention of either storing or sharing user-identifiable data beyond what is necessary to deliver the intended search service. We have always recognized the trust that Ubuntu users place in Canonical and in Ubuntu, and we take data privacy very seriously.

On Unintended Mature Content – Content not safe/suitable for work (NSFW) appearing in search results when not wanted is now being filtered out via a number of client and server side changes and the use of black-listed terms applied to search-as-you-type. While this implementation will cover many NSFW cases, some exceptions may still occasionally happen.

On Improving Search Quality – The team is currently focused on tackling the most obvious search quality issue – the return of commercial content when searching for software and applications on your computer. The Dash gives you what you want – every time. Sometimes that’s a product from Amazon, most often its not, and the better we judge that the better the experience will be. Search quality is an area where we expect to learn a great deal from and we will be looking at other improvements over the next cycle – along with the introduction of more user controls such as filters for personal and online content, and there will be sessions scheduled at the next Ubuntu Development Summit to discuss this.

On the “commercial” factor – Keeping the Ubuntu project sustainable requires the development of services that continuously improve the user experience and can at the same time be “monetized”. Evolving the Dash from a place to search for local files and software into a place that can give users instant access to any content, whether on your device or available online, personal or for purchase – is challenging, behavior changing, and if done right, potentially extremely valuable to users. Online commerce is a real and important part of our everyday experience, and with the Dash, we are inventing faster, slicker and more stylish ways for all of us to get more done with Ubuntu. Introducing it as a default in 12.10 recognizes that, and allows us to learn from intensive usage. For users who wish to opt out of online search altogether, we have introduced an “on/off” toggle in settings.

We’re excited about the journey taken to evolve the Dash, and to get where we want to, we’ll need the continued feedback we’ve enjoyed so far.

Canonical and the Ubuntu community have established a solid position for Ubuntu in the worlds of desktop, server and now cloud computing. We’re continuing to innovate in these areas, nimbly adapting to new ways of computing in a cloud-based, multi-device world. One where Ubuntu will ultimately run on mobiles, tablets and televisions – in fact, any screen, anywhere.

Every day, thousands of community members support the development of their favourite operating system. Even if they’re not software developers they help out with testing, documentation, marketing, brainstorming or answering other users’ questions in online forums. And people who don’t have the time to help out directly have always been able to make a financial contribution, albeit in a not-easy-to-find spot on our website. Many users have been asking for a simpler, more obvious way to do this.

Today, we’re making it easier for people to financially contribute to Ubuntu if they want to. By introducing a ‘contribute’ screen as part of the desktop download process, people can choose to financially support different aspects of Canonical’s work: from gaming and apps, developing the desktop, phone and tablet, to co-ordination of upstreams or supporting Ubuntu flavours. It’s important to note that Ubuntu remains absolutely free, financial contribution remains optional and it is not required in order to download the software.

By allowing Ubuntu users to choose which elements of Ubuntu they’re most excited about, we’ll get direct feedback on which favourite features or projects deserve the bulk of our attention. We’re letting users name their price – depending on the value that they put on the operating system or other aspects of our work. That price can, of course, be zero – but every last cent helps make Ubuntu better.

Ubuntu will always be free to use, share and develop. We hope it will continue to give you everything you want in an operating system – and we hope that you’ll join us in helping to build the future of computing, however you choose to contribute.

Today is the official launch of the OpenStack Foundation, which is leading the cloud industry in developing the most cutting-edge open enterprise-class cloud platform available. The OpenStack Foundation aims to promote the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack. As a founding platinum member, Canonical is involved by contributing to the project’s governance, technical development and strategy. We’re helping service providers and enterprises, as well as their customers and users, benefit from the open technologies that are making the cloud more powerful, simple and ubiquitous.

Canonical was the first company to commercially distribute and support OpenStack – and Ubuntu has remained the reference operating system for the OpenStack project since the beginning – making it the easiest and most trusted route to an OpenStack cloud, whether for private use or as a commercial public cloud offering. We include it in every download of Ubuntu Server, one of the world’s most popular Linux server distributions, giving us a huge interest in its continuing development.

OpenStack developers are building and testing on Ubuntu every single day, which is why Ubuntu can fairly claim to be the most tightly integrated OS with OpenStack – and the most stringently tested. In short, if you want to run OpenStack then you really ought to run it on Ubuntu! Since 2009 we’ve been committed to the open cloud, and the creation of the OpenStack Foundation is a huge step in making it better.

Widely certified and supported for the long term, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is the most reliable platform on which to move from a pilot or proof of concept to a large-scale production deployment. It offers the robustness and agility you need for rapid scaling of the underlying cloud, with first-class support for the key virtualization technologies that underpin successful OpenStack deployments.

Already thousands of global enterprises and service providers are deploying their cloud infrastructures on Ubuntu and OpenStack. Organisations like Mercadolibre, Internap and Nectar are running their mission critical applications on their Ubuntu OpenStack clouds. Ubuntu and OpenStack are also powering clouds at the likes of HP, AT&T, Rackspace and Dell. We are seeing strong global demand from leading enterprises worldwide and can’t wait to share their stories in the coming months. Service providers are rapidly adopting Ubuntu and OpenStack; we see this in our engagements with every one of the world’s largest service providers.

OpenStack and Ubuntu share the same six-monthly release schedule. But, while OpenStack is still young and developing fast, Ubuntu Server is a mature enterprise OS. In fact, most large companies choose to stay on our long-term support releases, which come out once every two years and are supported for five. So what about the majority of companies that need the stability and support of the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, alongside all the new OpenStack features and fixes that are released every six months?

That’s where our new Ubuntu Cloud Archive comes in. Unique to Ubuntu, it gives users the chance to run new versions of OpenStack as they are released, with full maintenance and support from Canonical, in the Ubuntu OS, even if they want to stay on the last LTS release.

Over recent months, other technology vendors have recognised the lead and impact that OpenStack is making in the market and have announced their commitment to the project. We should see even more of them joining the party and coming up with OpenStack offerings in the months to come. But in the meantime, the best way to build your OpenStack cloud is through the proven, rock-solid combination of OpenStack and Ubuntu.

You can read about the OpenStack Foundation news here.

UPDATE: We’ve just added four more amazing titles to the Humble Indie Bundle 6! If you’ve already picked up a bundle, you’ll find BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Gratuitous Space Battles, Jamestown, and Wizorb available now if you beat the average. This brings the bundle to ten games strong!

Humble Indie Bundle 6 is upon us – and every single game makes its Ubuntu debut this time around. Humble Bundle veterans will know the drill by now, but if this is your first time, prepare to be amazed. For the next two weeks, you can pay what you want to for the following incredible new titles on Ubuntu:

- Torchlight, the critically acclaimed action-RPG

- Shatter, the physics-based brick breaker

- Space Pirates & Zombies, the top down space combat sim

- Rochard, the rugged sci-fi action platformer

- Vessel*, the steampunk puzzle platformer

It gets better. If your donation is higher than the average, you’ll be rewarded with a sixth game download: the frantic acrobatic platformer Dustforce! *Please note that the finishing touches for Vessel’s Ubuntu debut are still being completed and should be ready in 24-72 hours.

There’s something extra special about Rochard because it’s the first native game based on the Unity engine to make it into both the Humble Bundle and the Ubuntu Software Center. The team at Unity is dedicated to their mission to democratize gaming, while strengthening their cross-platform gaming platform with the ability to export to Ubuntu.

With the Unity 4.0 release later this year, we can expect a raft of new games on Ubuntu. So it gives us great pleasure to welcome all Unity developers to what is easily the most enthusiastic indie gaming community.

To make life easier for independent game developers, we’ve been working hard to streamline the process of bringing new games to Ubuntu. Canonical has been developing a new service as part of our developer program to automatically package your applications – and that includes Unity games. This means developers can focus on their software, while Canonical takes care of the packaging for Ubuntu.

To learn even more about the games, check out the Humble Bundle site, where you’ll also find information about soundtracks, redemption through both the Ubuntu Software Center and Steam and donations to this bundle’s chosen charities: Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You have two weeks from now to get six brand new games for whatever price you think they’re worth. So lets make this bundle even bigger than the last one for Ubuntu – and the coming wave of gaming titles that continue to make Ubuntu great.

We’ve already written about Unity Technologies, supporting publishing applications to Linux in the next release of their platform, Unity 4.0. Canonical attended Unity’s Unite developer conference in Amsterdam, held 21-24 August, to meet with the nearly 1,200 Unity employees and developers and see first hand what to expect in Unity 4.0.

In Amsterdam, the Unite keynote kicked things off with an overview of the past few years and the evolution of Unity. Famed game designer Peter Molyneux, took to the stage and wowed the crowd with his latest game, the soon-to-be-renamed, Curiosity. The afternoon was filled with sessions geared towards developers who use Unity to create amazing games for all sorts of platforms. Thursday had a great session about how to use networking in Unity to create multiplayer games and how the new features in Unity 4.0 can make games come alive.

We already knew that Unity 4.0 is going to be unbelievable! The games that were showcased and won the Unity Awards really raised the bar for Unity development. You can get the lowdown on what Unity 4.0 has to offer, how to upgrade and what you need to run it from the FAQ. The free version of Unity 4.0 will, when released in a few months, include the new Mecanim engine and everything you need to start making incredible games right away. If you need a bit more power, additional effects, more streaming options and other tools, you’ll want to take a look at the Unity Pro 4.0 version. Either way free or pro, the great news is that publishing to Ubuntu is included.

On Friday, David Pitkin and I presented to a eager crowd about how Ubuntu and Unity’s new publish-to-Linux feature would open up their applications to millions of users who have a keen interest in getting their game on and buying games on Ubuntu machines. During and after the sessions we were bombarded with questions about how to get started with Ubuntu and submission requirements for the Ubuntu Software Center. We can’t wait for so many awesome games to arrive on Ubuntu in the coming months.

We had a great time at Unite, met some wonderful developers, played some excellent games, and got the word out on Ubuntu Software Center and publishing games to millions of Ubuntu users.

Get more information about the Ubuntu Software Center and MyApps. Be sure to like us on Facebook and follow @ubuntuappdev on Twitter.

Since its April release, 12.04 LTS has had an enthusiastic reception in organisations that look to the LTS for large scale deployments that will remain in place for many years. For those of you waiting for the first point release, we are delighted to announce Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS. This update to the current long-term support release, available from 23rd August, is the result of four months’ worth of real-life enterprise usage. The resulting fixes and enhancements translate into a rock-solid, thoroughly tested upgrade path for any enterprise running Ubuntu 10.04, the last LTS release.

Users on 10.04 LTS will then receive their first system notifications encouraging them to upgrade to the new LTS release. Consequently, we expect an even bigger shift among enterprise users than we experienced when it was first made available, back in April. Enterprise users can now be completely confident that the upgrade will be fast and free from disruption.

In April, we announced an ARM version of Ubuntu Server. In the 12.04.1 release, we’ve added support for Calxeda SOCs, so businesses can prepare for a datacentre dominated by low-energy, hyperscale servers by testing their workloads on the new hardware now.

The Ubuntu Cloud Archive also makes its debut – essentially an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu. It means Ubuntu Cloud users keep pace with OpenStack development, without having to migrate away from their chosen LTS release. Users will be able to download Folsom, the forthcoming release of OpenStack, and run it within their existing installation of Ubuntu.  For information on how to enable and use the Ubuntu Cloud Archive, please visit www.ubuntu.com/cloud/technical-resources.

On the desktop, a raft of bug fixes and security updates combine with five years of guaranteed updates and the option of commercial support to make this release an extremely attractive alternative to Windows. With native office apps and support for leading desktop virtualisation solutions, plus Unity, its modern, user-friendly GUI, Ubuntu enables desktop users to work more productively on the latest PCs, laptops and thin clients.

Ubuntu 12.04.1 is certified on 40 desktops, 98 laptops , 8 netbooks and 41 servers, including 12 of the latest HP Proliant Gen8 servers.

Canonical provides commercial support for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in the form of Ubuntu Advantage, a subscription programme that gives enterprise customers the choice of two levels of support and access to the time-saving systems management tool, Landscape, which includes audit, compliance and ongoing management features for large Ubuntu deployments.

Starting today, the third Humble Bundle for Android is available, bringing with it three games new to Ubuntu: Spirits, Fieldrunners and BIT.TRIP BEAT. Once again, the Humble Bundle provides for super-easy downloading through the Ubuntu Software Center. The bundle deal is only available for two weeks on a name-your-price basis – just like the Humble Indie Bundle before it – so don’t miss this opportunity. What’s great about this Android bundle is that the games will work on your phone as well as Ubuntu, Mac, Windows and other GNU/Linux desktops and laptops.

All three new games are great fun and will be surefire hits in the Ubuntu Software Center. We know you will like the tower defense game Fieldrunners; Spirits is a solid puzzle game and the pong beats in BIT.TRIP BEAT simply rock. SpaceChem and Uplink are updated for the bundle, so if you were waiting to get either one, now’s your chance. There are DRM-free soundtracks in there, too.

The team behind BIT.TRIP BEAT couldn’t be more excited about the launch of another Ubuntu game. As they explained this week, “releasing our games on Ubuntu takes Gaijin Games one step closer to our ever-present goal of dominating constantly. As our Ubuntu fan base grows and we release more games for the OS, we look forward to dominating constantly TOGETHER.”

In other gaming news, Canonical is sponsoring the Unite Conference next week. If you’re attending – or you’re one of the fourteen thousand developers and users who voted for Ubuntu and Linux support – we listened. Unity developers, get your games ready and we will see you in Amsterdam.

The cloud is disrupting the enterprise computing world, driven by the growth of open-source software. As a result, new opportunities are emerging; it’s time to exploit them. 

On the 30th October, Canonical will host an Ubuntu Enterprise Summit in Copenhagen. Industry analysts and enterprise users of Ubuntu and open source technologies, will join key figures from Canonical to discuss the opportunities these converging trends present.

The event is designed around three key topics

- How flexibility creates business value
- Choosing which bandwagon to board
- The way ahead, from client to cloud

With a keynotes from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and two streams of content – one aimed at business decision-makers and the other at enterprise technologists – it offers an essential briefing on delivering effective IT in a cloud-obsessed world.

Learn more and register your place.

These days, we spend more time online – working with docs, email, music and occasionally even accessing social media. But, our online and desktop experiences have been disjointed. We give applications the full run of our desktops, where they have their own icons and windows, but we trap the whole Internet inside one overworked application, the browser.

That’s why we’ve been working on a way to integrate the two worlds – something to make it just as easy to run a web application as a traditional app. And we’ve been working to give web applications access to the full range of desktop capabilities.

At OSCON today, Mark Shuttleworth revealed Ubuntu Web Apps, a new feature due to land in October’s Ubuntu 12.10 release. It will enable Ubuntu users to run online applications like Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, Ebay and GMail direct from the desktop. Making web applications behave like their desktop counterparts improves the user experience dramatically; it’s faster and it reduces the proliferation of browser tabs and windows that can quickly make a desktop unmanageable.

The apps can even take advantage of Ubuntu’s new HUD system, making it even easier to navigate. So Web properties leap to the forefront of modern UI design, making for amazingly productive, fast and fluid applications on the desktop.

That makes Ubuntu the best platform for the web – secure, fast and lightweight. This new feature is part of our drive to make the web a first class part of Ubuntu. We’ve already turned 40 popular web sites into Ubuntu Web Apps and there are plenty more on the way. It’s easy to integrate your favourite website or interface natively into the desktop, and share the result with all Ubuntu users. No other OS has come close to this level of integration between the web and desktop.

To see it in action check out this video:

Some examples of what users can do with Ubuntu WebApps:

• Launch online music site Last.FM directly from the Dash and control the music from Ubuntu’s sound menu

• Access and launch your social media accounts (Google+, Twitter, Facebook) from the Launcher, and get native desktop notifications

• Quickly and seamlessly upload photos to Facebook from Shotwell

• Pause and play the video you are watching on Youtube

• See how many unread messages you have in your GMail account, in Ubuntu’s messaging indicator

Ubuntu Web Apps will be available as a preview for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS soon and will be available by default in Ubuntu 12.10. I think we’ve made something that’s about to radically change users’ expectations of the web!

Yesterday, the Valve Linux team publicly announced their ongoing work to bring Steam to Linux. A major part of that announcement is the choice of Ubuntu 12.04.

Valve has been a major force in gaming since 1996. Gabe Newell and the Valve team have created some of the best game series EVER. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and most recently Portal are extremely popular, and quite addicting.

The one thing missing early on was a good distribution mechanism. Valve learned early on that retail physical box distribution can only go so far and was expensive. The Steam client came out of hiding in 2003 and has been a driving force ever since. Many game platforms have tried to create what Steam provides from multiplayer communication and community features but none are as strong.

The linux gaming community has been very vocal in trying to get more support in the gaming community. With the growth in numbers of independent developers, the number of indie games supporting Linux growing exponentially, and quite popular game engines such as Unity3D supporting Ubuntu, Valve finally came to the conclusion that even their game engine Source has to come to Ubuntu.

The announcement states there is a 11 person team working on bringing the Steam client to Ubuntu and the first game will be Left 4 Dead 2. This is yet another huge development in the gaming space for Ubuntu users.

Unity Technologies announced Monday that the next version of Unity will support publishing to Ubuntu. This is fantastic news because it will enable developers to deliver their new and existing games to Ubuntu users very easily.

The Unity 4 game engine delivers new features like the Mecanim animation technology and a boost in game fidelity to everyone from the independent developer to a major studio. For game developers the gaming engine provides the majority of the technologies required to deliver a game – including things like sound, graphics and physics. Game studios standardise on using an engine so they can spend their time on the aspects of their game that will be unique. For Ubuntu to be supported by game developers the gaming engines are a critical dependency – without them developers cannot port or target new games.

Unity Technologies made their name with independent developers who often target alternative platforms where they can stand out from the crowd of games created by the major studios. Unity Technologies is well known for their deep technology ability and for targeting alternative platforms such as Android. We have been in discussions with Unity Technologies since last summer as there is a lot of developer demand for a market ripe for awesome games. We are delighted to see Unity commit to publishing to Ubuntu – a significant commitment for a team handling so many platforms.

Following on from EA publishing games to the Software Center in May and the Humble Indie Bundle supporting Ubuntu in June – the past several months have been fantastic for gaming on Ubuntu, and Unity 4 support of Ubuntu promises to make next year even better.

If you would like to get involved developing or porting games to Ubuntu with Unity during the beta you can pre-order Unity 4 Pro. In the meantime there are lots of resources available on The Ubuntu Developer site. This month we are running the Ubuntu App Showdown contest with fantastic prizes for the best apps developed.