Canonical Voices

Posts tagged with 'canonical-voices'

Steve George

Want to know Canonical’s secret business plan? Or find out the latest features we’re working on in Ubuntu or UbuntuOne? Then hop over to the Canonical Voices site.  It’s a blog aggregator that provides a single location for Canonical employees to blog and engage with the wider world.

Many Canonical employees develop Ubuntu directly making them members of the Ubuntu community so their views already appear on Ubuntu Planet. However, there are lots of Canonical employees who work in other areas, such as with OEM’s, or on UbuntuOne, in marketing or with business customers. Canonical voices brings together everyone in the company and provides a single place where you can see the breadth of their views, opinions and thoughts.

As an Open Source technology company we’re working within a variety of communities; sometimes that means an Open Source project, but it could mean a group of users or a set of companies. So it’s important for us to be transparent and to engage in a conversation – encouraging understanding and perhaps sparking interesting ideas. Canonical Voices provides a space for that.

A connected point is that Canonical hires a lot of intelligent, opinionated and interesting people who are great communicators. Hopefully, Voices will provide a focus and context for those that want to blog, sparking everyone within the company to feel they are part of an organisation wide conversation. Personally, I’ve been reading Voices regularly for the last few weeks and I’ve already learnt lots of interesting things about other projects within Canonical.

I can’t promise that I’ll be any better at blogging regularly, I’ve already broken quite a few promises and resolutions on that front! Nonetheless, I’ve started aggregating posts about Ubuntu, Linux and Canonical over to the Voices site. Please check it out and become part of the conversation!


Tagged: Ubuntu

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Steve George

A very long time ago, in a parallel universe managing backups on Linux was a real headache.  If you can remember all the way back to the mid 90′s these wasn’t journaling or iSCSI and Linux wasn’t as stable as it is now – so having good backups was your only lifeline! Arkeia was the the first back-up software that I used for the linux systems, at the time most of the other vendors didn’t support Linux. Of course there were free software options, but they were really hard to use. And anyway, we didn’t want backup, we wanted restore. So Arkeia it was, and it worked very well.

As backup is so easy to ignore, anything that makes it easier is good news. That’s why it’s great news that Arkeia now supports Ubuntu. They recently announced that Arkeia Network Backup version 8 is available on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Arkeia have also signed up as a Silver Partner in the Ubuntu Partner programme.

Arkeia is a network backup system, so it’s suitable for a networked environment. There’s a central backup server where all the backups are stored on disk or tape, and individual clients are installed on each system within the network. The agent itself is available for Ubuntu, RH, Novell SUSE, OSX and Windows. So in one scenario you can use an Ubuntu server as the central backup server and install agents on all the other systems in your network. Alternatively, if you have an existing Arkeia set-up this announcement means you can install the agent on your Ubuntu systems and back them up to your existing backup server.

If you’d like to try out Arkeia they’re also offering a free version for Ubuntu users. A pre-licensed version is available through the Ubuntu partner repository, so if you have this switched on then a simple apt-get install arkeia will download and install it. With this free license you can backup two systems (any platform including Windows and OSX) with up to 250GB of files whether tape or disk based. See their documentation for more information.

If you don’t have a backup system this is a great way to get started.


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