“On Sunday, Canonical will release its next upgrade to Ubuntu,
version 10.10, and to hear executives talk about the server edition
of this Linux distribution, it’s all about the cloud —
particularly Amazon’s cloud.“Why Sunday? Because that will make the 10.10 release available
on 10/10/10. So we’ll give the Canonical folks points for being
cute. Version 10.10, also known by its code name Maverick Meekrat,
is an interim release. The long-term-support release is still
10.04. Canonical likes to upgrade frequently so it always has a
distribution with the cutting edge stuff in it. Every three years,
it releases a long-term support (LTS) version that it maintains
with patches and tweaks.“GorillaWith 10.10, the company was going for tighter
integration with the cloud. By that Canonical means one cloud in
particular, Amazon’s EC2. “Amazon is the main story in town, the
main reason we put a lot of work into EC2,” Canonical’s Steve
George, vice president of business development, told me.
“Everything [in Ubuntu’s cloud support] is using the Amazon API, so
any management platform which supports the Amazon API, can manage
your Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.”