Author: JT Smith
PowerPC support
Today we live in a different world than the one Ubuntu was born in. When the first version of Ubuntu was released, Apple was (as far as anyone knew) still fully behind the PowerPC processors for its hardware, and a number of users wanted Linux support for PowerPC desktops.
I saw quite a few Apple laptops at the summit, but almost all of them were running Ubuntu, and I’d wager that at least half to two-thirds of the laptops running Ubuntu were Intel-based. According to the PowerPC review spec, only 0.8% of downloads from archive.ubuntu.com are for the PowerPC architecture as of November 2006, down from 1.95% in July 2005.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman each indicated that dropping official support for Ubuntu’s desktop install on PowerPC was on the table. While demand for PowerPC is declining, the work required to keep the port current remains steady.
Lack of official support doesn’t mean that PowerPC support would go out the window entirely. If demand for PowerPC server installs remains steady, it could be maintained as an unofficial port and moved to ports.ubuntu.com.
Audio editing made simple with Jokosher
Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon demonstrated an interesting new application called Jokosher that’s slated for inclusion with Ubuntu 7.04. The 0.1 Jokosher release is included in the Ubuntu 6.10 repositories, but it’s not feature-complete yet.
Bacon, who is also behind the LugRadio podcast, says that the project got its start because Linux lacks a simple audio editing application. He says that he had put up some ideas on his blog about what would be an ideal audio editing application, and things progressed from there.
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Jono Bacon talks about Ubuntu community – click to view video |
From a usability standpoint, Jokosher has one of the nicest user interfaces that I’ve seen so far, certainly head and shoulders above Audacity and other audio editors that run on Linux.
Instead of dealing with tracks, Jokosher works with instruments. This is similar to Apple’s GarageBand, though Bacon says the idea is not derived from GarageBand. Jokosher is a modal editor, which means the interface is slightly different depending on whether you’re recording or mixing a project.
Once you’ve recorded an instrument, editing the audio is easy. For instance, to adjust the audio level of a section of audio, shift-click on the beginning and end of the section you want to manipulate to make a volume selector appear on the beginning and end of the track, then drag that to the level that you want. It’s an intuitive way to create fade-ins and fade-outs or just tweak the volume of a track.
Cutting and splicing audio is even easier — just double-click on a portion of the audio and it will create a split in the track. You can then drag the audio to the position on the timeline that you want, or cut it out of the track entirely and splice two other sections together.
If things go as planned between now and the Feisty release, Jokosher should be a killer app for those who want to use Linux for audio production.
Telepathy
I also spent some time talking to Simon McVittie of Collabora about Telepathy, a project to provide “a unified framework for all forms of real-time conversations,” which includes IRC, instant messaging, VoIP, and video chat.
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Matt Zimmerman talks about Ubuntu – click to view video |
Telepathy aims to provide unified access to communication protocols so that applications can communicate over a protocol, like Jabber or IRC, by communicating with Telepathy over D-Bus, rather than each application having to reinvent the wheel to be able to communicate over Jabber, IRC, or other communication protocols.
Telepathy provides connection managers, like Gabble for the Jabber protocol, which then can be used by any application to connect over those protocols. Gabble is the only “official” protocol, but additional connection managers are available to provide IRC, MSN, and other protocols.
McVittie says that IM client Gossip, using Telepathy as a back end, is under discussion for inclusion with Feisty. This will give Gossip access to additional protocols via the connection managers, and might make it possible for Gossip to displace Gaim as the default IM client in Ubuntu.
Telepathy’s long-term plan goes beyond just chatting with friends and family over the ‘Net. For instance, the Jokosher team is planning to add “network instruments” to Jokosher after the 1.0 release, and the plan right now is to use Telepathy to make that happen. Network instruments would allow users to record VoIP or other audio sessions directly to Jokosher, a nifty feature for putting together an audiocast.
What’s new for the desktop?
GNOME is just beginning its release cycle, so it’s too early to say for sure what will be in GNOME 2.18. However, I spent some time talking to GNOME developers at the summit, and they shared a few items that are likely to appear in GNOME 2.18 and Ubuntu 7.04.
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One of the things missing in Edgy is a desktop search tool like Beagle. It looks like Ubuntu is going to forgo Beagle integration in favor of Tracker, mostly for performance reasons.
GNOME 2.18 should also include GnomeScan, a Google Summer of Code 2006 project which will replace XSane and provide an API for scanner access directly to other GNOME applications. GNOME 2.18 is expected to include Network Manager, which also looks to be on the feature list for Feisty. Network Manager is supposed to provide better support for roaming users who have to switch networks on the fly. However, Network Manager doesn’t support static configurations at the moment, so the Ubuntu devs are going to have to put some work into make sure that Network Manager is suitable for users who still have static network configurations.
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Murray Cumming talks about GNOME – click to view video |
I talked to several KDE and Kubuntu folks at the summit about what’s going to be in Kubuntu for the Feisty release. At the time Feisty is released, KDE 4 will still not be ready for production use, so the KDE and Kubuntu devs I spoke to told me that 7.04 will probably include KDE 3.5.6 as the default desktop, with KDE 4 available as a development reference platform. KDE 3.5.6 is primarily a maintenance release, and probably won’t include a lot of new features, since most of the KDE team’s work is being put toward KDE 4 at this point.
KDE 4 will probably land mid-cycle, somewhere between Feisty and Feisty+1, and Riddell says that Kubuntu users will be able to get KDE 4 packages shortly after it’s officially released, but KDE 4 won’t be in an officially supported release until Kubuntu 7.10.
Though Kubuntu is KDE focused, Kubuntu Feisty will include OpenOffice.org by default rather than KOffice until at least Feisty+1, with one exception. The project plans to include Kexi as a database component rather than OpenOffice.org Base, because the Kubuntu devs feel that it’s a more mature offering, and offers support for the Microsoft Access format, while OpenOffice.org does not provide support for MDB files.
For users who want to move away from Microsoft Windows, Kubuntu 7.04 should also include a migration assistant to move user settings from Windows to Linux. The tool should help users import their mail, browser, and other settings to Linux apps so they don’t have to re-enter that data manually.
Kubuntu developers are planning to include KNetworkManager, a front-end for Network Manager, in Feisty by default. Right now, Kubuntu’s default network manager is the default KDE network management application, which is a bit clunky.
Many users complained about difficulty upgrading from Dapper to Edgy, and that’s a complaint that’s been taken to heart by Ubuntu developers. Apparently, the situation is even worse with Kubuntu, as Adept doesn’t support the distro upgrade operation, so Kubuntu developers are working to make that a supported option in Feisty.
Ubuntu community
One of the things that makes Ubuntu so successful is the community that’s formed around the distribution. Out of about 140 attendees for the summit, only 30 were employed by Canonical to work on Ubuntu. The rest were there because of personal or commercial interests in Ubuntu. Shuttleworth and company seem to have done a pretty good job of bridging the commercial and community divide, and community building and governance was a major topic at the summit.
Bacon says that the Local Community (LoCo) teams are an essential tool for community building with Ubuntu. Several LoCo teams have formed already, and Bacon says they’re doing a great job on the local level, but aren’t talking to one another and sharing ideas as effectively as they could.
To that end, several ideas are being discussed to help make the LoCo teams more effective, such as providing centralized resources for approved LoCo teams rather than requiring the teams to provide their own Web sites and mailing lists, and providing mentoring services for new teams to help them get off the ground.
In some ways, LoCo teams seem like specialized Linux user groups (LUG). I asked Bacon what relationship LoCo teams should have with LUGs — or if LoCo teams could replace LUGs. Bacon says that he doesn’t think that LoCo teams “tread on the toes” of LUGs, because most LUGs do little or no advocacy, and the LoCo teams are all about Ubuntu advocacy and, in some cases, for help with translation as well.
There’s also discussion of helping with local Ubuntu conferences and a yearly Ubuntu user’s conference, though that hasn’t been set in stone.
Several other governance specs were under discussion at the summit, including team councils for different groups in the Ubuntu community, and creating a closed developer list due to increasing noise on the official ubuntu-devel list. The idea that seems to be gaining traction is an official ubuntu-devel list for Ubuntu developers only and a devel-discuss list that will be open to all. The ubuntu-devel list would be archived and open to the public, but only developers would be able to post to the list, to keep the noise level down.
Canonical, profitability, and Ubuntu derivatives
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Mark Shuttleworth talks about Ubuntu – click to view video |
A persistent question about Ubuntu is whether the distribution can parlay its popularity into commercial success. I asked Shuttleworth how Ubuntu is doing commercially, and he replied that the distro is enjoying “rapidly increasing demand for real professional support,” though he didn’t say whether the company is breaking even or pulling a profit at this point.
Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is most successful where “people are doing their own thing based on a free software stack … just need a stable OS, and don’t need the proprietary pieces.”
He mentioned a project by Seimens using Ubuntu for a video streaming appliance for telcos as one example, and Ubuntu is being used for a number of derivative distros, commercial and otherwise, such as MEPIS, Impi Linux, and the philosophically distinct Linux Mint and gNewSense distributions.
Shuttleworth says the biggest challenge for Ubuntu right now is “the chicken and the egg” problem of getting Ubuntu certified to run proprietary applications like Oracle. Ubuntu has to have enough customers to justify the vendor’s cost to certify an application on Ubuntu, and customers want Ubuntu to be certified to run their apps before they deploy Ubuntu.
However, Shuttleworth says that Ubuntu is seeing success in green field deployments. “I can think of three conversations we’re having with Fortune 50s. They’re not thinking of replacing Red Hat with Ubuntu, because we don’t have the same matching stack … but in cases where they can [deploy Ubuntu], they’re looking at it.”
In the long run, Shuttleworth asserts that Ubuntu will be at parity on certifications with Red Hat within five to seven years or less, and that he has “no problem plugging away at it for that length of time.”
