Joyent, well-known on the cloud computing scene and a growing player in Big Data analytics, announced a partnership with Canonical today to provide customers with optimized and supported Ubuntu server images in the Joyent Cloud. Effectively, users will be able to leverage a Canonical-customized Ubuntu in the cloud. The two companies also want to enable developers and enterprises to create mobile, big data and high-performance applications on Ubuntu and Joyent's OS-Virtualized cloud platform.

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Systemd – the d is for dominates: The Debian Technical Committee decided that, after quite a bumpy process, that it would follow Fedora, Arch Linux, Mageia and openSUSE in planning to switch to systemd in the next release. The Debian change rippled down to Ubuntu where, probably sooner than anyone anticipated, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would switch too.

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Canonical is finally poised to enter the mobile market. After years of teases, promises and demos, the company has locked up the first two manufacturers of Ubuntu phones. Meizu and BQ Readers will be releasing handsets with the Linux-based OS installed on them sometime in 2014. Details about release date, price and specs are still to be determined, but we were told to expect more info at Mobile World Congress (which kicks off this weekend). The list of supporting carriers also remains a mystery, but at least we know that there will be consumer-ready Ubuntu phones on the market before the end of the year. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's founder, is keeping things close to his chest, but he did say that two more manufacturers with "household names" should be coming on board in 2015.

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Mesa 10.1 brings many new OpenGL features, new hardware support, and as with most Mesa updates is a very worthwhile upgrade for users of the open-source Linux graphics stack. There's been many articles about Mesa 10.1 on Phoronix while there's also the Mesa 10.1 feature overview. Mesa 10.1 itself is in a release candidate stage but should be officially released later this month on 28 February.

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Hello Linux Geeksters. Recently, Smart Communications, a mobile carrier from Philippines, has joined Ubuntu’s Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), in order to support Ubuntu Touch, the mobile version and Ubuntu, and sell phones with Ubuntu for phones pre-installed.

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No one knows…

Last year during an interview Jonathan Riddell, the lead developer of Kubuntu, told us that Ubuntu teams were telling Linux Mint that they needed a license from Canonical in order to use compiled packages from Ubuntu.

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For those curious how AMD's Catalyst Linux performance is doing as we get 2014 underway with the first Catalyst 14.1 beta, here are benchmarks from nine different AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux and running this latest publicly available driver when looking at both the OpenGL graphics and OpenCL compute performance.

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The wallpaper contest for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr is taking part right now, everybody being able to submit their photos until the 5th of March 2014.

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Canonical had raised hopes that its plan for Ubuntu to span PCs and mobile devices would be realised with the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 release, providing a write-once, run-on-many template similar to that planned by Google for its Chrome OS and Android app convergence.

This is already possible on paper and the infrastructure is in place on smartphone and tablet versions of Ubuntu through its new Unity 8 user interface.

However, Canonical has decided to postpone the rollout of Unity 8 for desktop machines, citing security concerns, and it will now not appear along with the Mir display server this coming autumn.

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With this move Canonical has slowed the alienation of Ubuntu from the rest of the Linux community. It also shows that Canonical also understand that it can’t fork it’s path too much from the mainstream Linux community, especially from mommy Debian. In a nutshell it’s a wise and welcome decision by Ubuntu leadership and will help them focus on more pressing issues which will help make Ubuntu better.

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• China switches on to Ubuntu in hunt for Windows XP successor

• Chinese software pioneer Red Flag bites the dust

• Chinese Linux Distributor Red Flag Software Disappears Overnight

• China shutters Windows ‘rival’ Red Flag Linux

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

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Last week I was in Orlando sprinting with my team as well as the platform, SDK, and security teams and some desktop and design folks. As usual after a sprint, I have been slammed catching up with email, but I wanted to provide a summary of some work going that you can expect to see soon in the Ubuntu app developer platform.

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Vodafone joined Ubuntu’s Carrier Advisory Group, as Ubuntu demoed progress on a unified desktop/mobile UI, but a Debian decision may further isolate Ubuntu.

Canonical has yet to sign up any vendors or carriers for upcoming smart phones running Ubuntu, which is not surprising, considering the first Ubuntu phone release appears to have slipped to 2015. However, the company has signed up an impressive roster of mobile providers that are at least intrigued enough to join its Carrier Advisory Group (CAG). Now, leading European carrier Vodafone has joined the pack, which already includes U.S. carriers including Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile.

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The distribution of Steam keys to the Debian and Ubuntu developers is being handled by a third-party company called Collabora, which is consulting Valve in open source matters.

One of the Collabora employees, who is actually responsible for sending the keys and verifying the authenticity of the developers, has posted a very interesting blog message, detailing some of the techniques and emails from various scammers.

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One of Canonical's main goals in bringing Ubuntu to mobile devices is to create a converged platform across smartphones, tablets, and PCs. As such, a developer should be able to write an app that has a single code base yet runs on all three types of devices, presenting a different interface to the user on each form factor.

Technically, this has already been achieved. Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon this week showed off Karma Machine, a reddit client built by a third-party developer using the Ubuntu SDK:

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Going forward, systemd will be Debian's default init system for Linux distributions, an init system soon to be used by every other major Linux distribution other than Ubuntu.

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After this weekend sharing benchmarks of the recent Ubuntu 12.04 LTS point releases, here's some complementary tests that offer a look at the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" performance against the current state of the "Trusty Tahr", a.k.a. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

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We have received insufficient nominations to fill all of the vacant seats. The deadline for nominations is therefore being extended by *two weeks*. This makes the timescale as follows: - Nominations should be received by: February 24, 2014 00:00 UTC - Election (if any) starts: Febuary 24, 2014 - Election (if any) concludes: March 10 2014: ~12:00 UTC - New members confirmed on: March 10 2014, with terms beginning March 11, 2014

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As I'm sure most will be aware, for the last couple of weeks, Valve have
offered access to all Valve produced games free of charge to Debian
Developers [0].

As of today, they have kindly extended this to all registered Ubuntu
Developers [1].

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