Computers

With the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala on 29 October, it is clear that Canonical has aimed its flagship operating system at the enterprise.

When 9.04 shipped, it became apparent that Ubuntu had succeeded where all other versions of Linux have failed — it was an operating system anyone can use. True, there are plenty of good, solid, easy-to-use Linux distributions, but none have offered such a level of simplicity and appeal.

Now, with the release of 9.10, Ubuntu has gone one better and taken its already user-friendly Linux distribution and made a concerted effort to gain ground in the enterprise. Here are 10 reasons why Ubuntu 9.10 should make businesses happy.

1. Software Center
This is the big one. Ubuntu has migrated away from the old add-remove software tool in favour of the Software Center. This tool is just as user-friendly as the old one, but has one feature the old tool lacked — commercial software.

That is correct. Ubuntu has finally included commercial software in its software installation tool. So now users can install not only the usual open-source tools, but they are also able to find plenty of commercial software that can be installed with a few simple clicks — and a purchase here and there.

This feature is good news for business users who need more than the open-source community has to offer.

2. Ubuntu One
If you have ever used DropBox, you know how helpful having a file or folder synchronisation tool can be. Ubuntu One is just as easy to use as DropBox.

It performs instant, automatic synchronisation and offers two plans — a free one with 2GB of space and a paid-for service with 50GB.

You can also add as many machines as you like to your Ubuntu One account.

3. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images
With Ubuntu 9.10, businesses can download and use images on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. You can also try out the latest 9.10 server image instantly — on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud with a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image. You can even download an image and put it directly into your Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

4. Quickly
A new framework called Quickly enables developers to work faster. Quickly provides a command-line framework for generating code projects, storing changes in version control, building packages and releasing software.

To do this, Quickly uses templates that allow specialised behaviours to be defined for different types of projects. The Quickly templates define such behaviours as edit, save, dialog, glade and package. You can think of Quickly as a Rails-like tool for Ubuntu application development.

5. Better Intel graphics support
The new kernel that ships with 9.10 has the kernel mode enabled for Intel graphics. Add to that the driver switch fromthe troubled EXA to the newer UXA acceleration method, and anyone with Intel graphics — and that's a lot of users — will see better performance and quicker resumes from suspend.

6. Faster, stronger AppArmor
Ubuntu 9.10 ships with more profiles for AppArmor and an improved parser that uses cache files, which speed up initialisation at bootup.

Although AppArmor is not a tool for the new Linux user, it lets you set up machines that are even more secure than before. You can even use Firefox with an AppArmor profile. Also included with 9.10 is the ability to move a process to an AppArmor profile or run without one.

7. Blocking module loading
This feature allows the blocking of unloaded modules once the machine has booted. Its primary focus is to prevent kernel root kits from being installed. This measure is handled by one-way sysctl flag /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled.

8. Boot time
The elusive 10-second boot time is drawing ever nearer. With the help of many improvements, Ubuntu 9.10 shortens the already short boot time offered by 9.04.

It has not reached 10 seconds yet, but it is close. This improvement will make many business users happy, because boot time is unproductive.

9. HAL deprecation
Some subsystems are being moved away from the hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Most important — to business users, at least — will be suspend-hibernate, which many know has been a big issue for Linux.

By moving these systems from HAL to DeviceKit-Power, DeviceKit-Devices and udev, these systems will be much more reliable. The change should mean that suspend and hibernate will work exactly as expected.

10. Telepathy
Telepathy is new to Linux and serves as a pluggable framework for real-time communication via chat, voice or video over IP, and logging.

Even more exciting, the framework is available to many programs.

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Telepathy can share connections between multiple clients, such as messaging, email and collaboration tools.

The stable components of Telepathy are the Gabble Jabber-XMPP connection manager, the Salut link-local XMPP connection manager, the Idle IRC connection manager and the Telepathy-SofiaSIP SIP connection manager. Many other tools are under development.

The primary benefit of Telepathy is that it provides a standard interface to simplify third-party development for applications that communicate with voice or instant messaging functions.

A bright future
If you are like me, you will be excited about the possibilities Ubuntu 9.10 offers on all levels — both personal and enterprise. The Ubuntu experience just keeps getting better and the 9.10 release goes a long way to prove that.