Ubuntu Insights

Typical use cases are: * fraud and anomaly detection * recommender systems * predictive analytics (churn, forecasting) * image recognition With image recognition, we hit 98% accuracy on a recent project. Until a few years ago, that was unheard of, and it's simply not possible with other algorithms, so for many companies, deep neural nets can make a significant difference. Here are two news stories about work we've done for clients: Making deep learning accessible on Openstack https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/25/making-deep-learning-accessible… For Canonical, we built a solution that predicts server breakdowns. For France Telecom's mobile unit, Orange, we built a fraud detection solution using anomaly detection: http://www.orangesv.com/blog/orange-deep-learning-work-featured-in-wal…

I have been using it on Ubuntu 16.04 and before that with Ubuntu 15.10 for about a year. Good news is its a first class citizen on Ubuntu now. I have have great success with it on my home server and have plans to try for some prod systems I'm building out. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/16/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in… https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS

If this starts utilizing the "Ubuntu on Windows"[0], I think, with minor modifications, most of the images should already work; which is great. I can't wait to see how containerization (and tools built for orchestration of those) will evolve in the coming years to help dev/devops. [0]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/30/ubuntu-on-windows-the-ubuntu-us…

(I've been following development on and off — lately more off.) Email is Dekko: https://launchpad.net/dekko (No idea about the name.) Based on (forked from) Trojitá. I haven't seen a maps app, but I know they're using Here/Nokia for location services (https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/07/30/nokia-here-maps-coming-to-ubunt… I think the BQ phone comes with a location "scope". The Here HTML5 app is pretty good on FxOS, so they could be using that.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Improve GNOME shell for less memory usage - DESCRIPTION: I hope that ubuntu shall be using GNOME shell (with ubuntu specific changes) as noted in the blog[0]. Right now GNOME shell is using around 100-200MiB (even more for several others) of memory on usual usage. I hope this could be reduced to some 50 MiB consistently, or even less. Also GNOME shell strongly depends on evolution-data-server, gdm, tracker (I think), etc. It would be nice if these dependencies are made optional (ie, recommended, but not required packages). So that gnome shell can be run on less memory IOT systems like RPi, older laptops etc without the other dependencies. This may require changes to gnome shell in upstream GNOME. Please do the packaging changes in Debian upstream. Thanks. [0] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

This is a bit of a shocker. Mark Shuttleworth's post is worth reading. [1] I actually liked Unity. There were a lot of reports of it being bloated and laggy but I found the exact opposite when I finally tried it. Unity was lightweight, fast and by far the most polished Linux desktop I have used which made all the bad press a bit mysterious. There are a lot of folks online who seem to hate Ubuntu with an unusual passion and dismiss its projects as NIH. The key to understanding this is to seek out how many projects by Redhat, Fedora, Freedesktop or the Gnome ecosystem are dismissed as NIH? Zero. This is curious to say the least. Redhat funds a lot of projects, its become a cathedral in the open source bazaar. The danger of centralization and concentration of power and money is the cathedral then becomes more interested in its own influence than anything it publicly professes. [1] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

After seeing positive Scaleway mentions here on HN several times I opened an account to test performance. Damn it was slow, and I had set my expectations very low. I can understand for a site that didn't need CPU-heavy performance (I intended to use it for a personal Nextcloud instance) but my main issue was with reboot time. Change any settings in the control panel? Reboot needed. Applied kernel updates and need to restart? Wait for that reboot. It was agonizing, I had to abandon the process and check back an hour later to see if starting or stopping the machine had completed. Even when I decided I was done and ready to cancel, one more wait of 40+ minutes for the machine to shut down so I could delete it and release the reserved IP. I admire the fact that they decided to try something very different, but forcing every customer to copy the entire contents of their drive to a second device and then copy it all back again to restart is nuts. Currently on OVH for most things (by far the best performance/price ratio for my usage) but still keeping a couple DigitalOcean VPSs due to concerns about OVH's 'special' version of Ubuntu[0], which has me concerned. Hope that's resolved soon or I'm back to DO + AWS as a Plan B. [0]https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/12/01/taking-a-stand-against-unstable…

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/snaps-for-classic-ubuntu/ > The security mechanisms in snap packages allow us to open up the platform for much faster iteration across all of our flavours as snap applications are isolated from the rest of the system. Users can install a snap without having to worry whether it will have an impact on their other apps or their system. Similarly, developers have a much better handle on the update cycle as they can decide to bundle specific versions of a library with their app. Transactional updates make deployments of snap packages more robust and reliable. > By bringing snap packages to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS we are unifying the experience for Ubuntu developers, whether they are creating software for PC, Server, Mobile, and IoT Devices. Snapcraft, a tool available for snap development, makes it easy for developers to package their apps and dependencies. Developers targeting snap packages get a great environment to write and test their applications – directly on their desktop, rather than being forced to use a device or a virtual machine. I think it is just a poorly worded announcement that implied security isolation on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS when that was not the intention. Similarly, they are just as secure as apt so there is no loss of security so the claim of the OP's title is misleading.

> Microservices are a solution to a people problem, not a technical problem. They are a solution when in a large organization groups find it is easier to focus on a small problem space and communicate with other groups less - and also have a bit more room to choose their own path. Microservices are a solution for more than that. For one thing, it allows you to isolate components, which is rarely a bad thing. If something is going to die, I would much rather lose a single component of the application than the entire application. The component that suffered a failure may not be integral to some uses of the application (i.e. perhaps the email importing portion of a helpdesk app dies). Beyond that, it helps with deployments to some degree. I deal with this all the time, it's much much easier to schedule and execute deployments if I only have to handle one group of people. Each additional person/group just increases the number of requirements that surround the deployment, and more often than not, it ends up taking longer to actually get to the deployment due to the amount of communication that needs to happen. > Do them when you have a problem, tighter coupling in your app stack and having less types of images means a much easier deployment, and probably more efficient code with less moving parts. It also means that there's a much greater surface area to investigate, although proper logging can help mitigate that. It's easier to find a bug in 2,000 lines of code than it…

I guess the real story is that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will use X.org by default, rather than Wayland [1]. Canonical "pretending Mir never existed" is just click bait. Personally, I found Unity not half-bad, and am not looking forward to gnome-shell from what little I know, eg. for its wasteful menu-per-window attachment rather than Mac OS style global menus alone. [1]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/bionic-beaver-18-04-lts-to-use-…

This should probably point to the original announcement from Canonical: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/bionic-beaver-18-04-lts-to-use-…

Should be coming on/before Tuesday: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/04/ubuntu-updates-for-the-meltdown…

They will be available on 2018/01/09: "Ubuntu users of the 64-bit x86 architecture (aka, amd64) can expect updated kernels by the original January 9, 2018 coordinated release date, and sooner if possible." https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/04/ubuntu-updates-for-the-meltdown…

Here's an example of one of the options, it's ~$100 less if configured with Ubuntu-16.04: http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-pre… Canonical posted a short review of the available Dell models recently: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/11/14/new-dell-precision-machines-ava… (HN on the article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15702680)

Up until March of this year, the Ubuntu kernel was not tuned for AWS. This included not having support for Elastic Network Adapter, which limited network speeds when compared to Amazon Linux. See here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/ubuntu-on-aws-gets-serious-perf…

I don't know where you got that impression, but it is not at all accurate: the issue is that ZFS is licensed under the CDDLv1, which some key players (but clearly not all; it is not even clear if it is a majority, but I don't know if the people claiming it isn't are motivated to do so) believe to be incompatible with the GPLv2. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/ vs. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/

Don't hold your breath. The project was effectively cancelled in April. There's theoretically a "UBPorts" project that may continue development, but, without any sort of company backing it anymore, I doubt that it's going to have much of an impact. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

the courts will not allow that. you may claim that you recently discovered that there is infringement or you can claim that you are a new owner of a patent and are enforcing it. But I dont think courts will take too kindly to someone who knowingly sat without doing something and waited for it to become big. I would assume that Canonical has already sent infromation about this to Oracle. If they havent done anything now, they cant do anything later. in fact - https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/ We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses

Here's the other side of the argument: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/ """The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system. And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris.""" This has been shipped in Ubuntu for a year now and nothing bad has happened, so it must be OK. Maybe.

Broken link, try https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/06/23/ubuntu-server-development-summa…

The Atom snap announcement goes into a bit more detail about this. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/05/11/atom-is-now-available-as-a-snap… Basically it means no filesystem sandboxing.

I think Canonical is attempting to identify other investors, and the 'due diligence' on that resulted in a desire to focus on server/container type activity and to pull out of projects that have no obvious commercial value in the medium term. Have a look here... https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io… So nothing to do with organisational bravery, or indeed the relative quality of the design, just cold hard cash and revenue streams.

URL should probably be the one of the original announcement: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/12/a-new-vantage-point/

The original blog post: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

Could we get this URL changed to the original blog post[0] and the title changed accordingly? [0]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io… Source link.

Damn. From the horses mouth: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io… I might be a small minority, but I _like_ Unity 7. I have never used Unity 8, and I thought the Ubuntu phone was misspent effort, but wow. Now I have to figure out if there is a way to style Gnome to look like Unity 7. I wonder what this means for Mir vs Wayland as well.

Better url for this story: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…

Ditching Unity + Mir, and returning to Gnome. Convergence is good. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-io…