Ubuntu’s Enterprising Ibex Springs Into Release

“Ibex will be maintained for 18 months, compared to the previous
version (Hardy Heron) which has a lifetime of five years, but
organizations willing to forgo the longevity of Heron are promised
a whole raft of new features. “This release is an opportunity
to bring in interesting and exciting work that has been done by the
community,” explained Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s
founder, during a press call.

“Virtualization Leads the List of New Features
So what’s new in Ibex? Inevitably, enhanced virtualization
capabilities are among the new features Shuttleworth is keen to
highlight. The pared down, minimalist Just Enough OS (JEOS) version
of Ubuntu introduced in Heron is now an installation option in
Ibex, enabling administrators to create a lightweight instance of
the operating system with “just enough” features for
virtual appliances. Ibex also introduces a virtual machine builder
tool (imaginatively called Vm-builder) to set up, create and deploy
a virtual machine in under five minutes. “This makes it
trivial for sys admins to design a virtual machine and deploy it on
Amazon[’s Elastic Compute Cloud service],” said
Shuttleworth.”

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