The Open Source Advocate

Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire behind Ubuntu, has recently provided some information on the future direction of Ubuntu. This mail charts the territory post-Dapper for those of us who like to dream a little. First things first. The codename of Dapper+1 will be: The Edgy Eft And here's why. Edgy is all about cutting edge, perhaps bleeding edge,brand new code and infrastructure. It will be the right time to bring in some seriously interesting but definitely edgy new technologies which lay the groundwork for the next wave of Ubuntu development. An Eft is a youthful newt, going through its first exploration of the rocky territory just outside the stream. And that's exactly what we hope the development team will do with Ubuntu during the Edgy cycle - explore slightly unfamiliar and uncharted territory that is perhaps a little out of the mainstream. So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a ...

This is an example of what happens when someone uses a Peer-to-Peer ( P2P ) application over a T-1 line . Notice the normal traffic patterns on the left, and the P2P traffic on the right. (That is where it is bouncing along at 100% bandwidth usage). You can see that this user was uploading just as fast as he downloaded. By the end of the day, this user's connection was disabled and traffic returned to normal. If you want to easily create graphs like this for your network, I highly recommend taking a look at Cacti. Once Cacti is installed, the device monitoring and graphs can all be setup via the beautiful web-interface.

Being fairly new to the Beehive State, I was pleased to see so many people here are involved in open source. The newest face of this movement is the Utah Open Source Planet. The Planet is an aggregation of blogs from people who support open source. In fact, my blog is one of the many that are posted there. The Planet is a great way to share ideas and meet other people with similar interests. Many posters have included a " hackergotchi " head-shot and GPS coordinates, which makes it easier to associate the online persona with a real person. I am starting to feel part of this thriving community, and I look forward to opportunities to meet these people in the real world. While I am talking about it, I want to ask a question that may help me understand the local community better. At the last OALUG meeting, we were talking about the most popular distro of each Utah LUG. Here the best we came up with: OALUG = Ubuntu FSLC = Debian PLUG = Gentoo SLLUG = ??? UVLUG = ??? Did ...

Aaron Toponce had some questions about the commercial aspect of Ubuntu .... I guess in a nutshell, I am not too upset that Ubuntu offers commercial support. Commercial/paid support will attract businesses, and pour more money into the project. It just surprised me, because I thought Ubuntu was Debian, just with it’s own hacks and implementations. I guess it’s a lot more than that. Aaron, I am a huge fan of Debian, which is the rock upon which Ubuntu is built. Let me try to convince you that Ubuntu is not your standard commercial entity, and in fact it is worthy of your time and continued contributions. When Mark Shuttleworth created Canonical (the company that does the lion’s share of work on Ubuntu, including the free shipit CDs), he did not go into it with the idea of making a profit. Ubuntu is one of Mark’s ways of giving back to the world. Canonical does offer commercial support, because this is what many business require before using a piece of software. However, Canonical do...