So, the basic values of of Ubuntu Server: freely available, provide developers access to the latest technology through a regular cadence of releases and optimise for cloud and scale out have been in place for years. Both adoption and revenue confirm it is the right strategy long term. Enterprises are evolving and starting to adopt Ubuntu and the model of restricting access to bits unless money is paid is now drawing to a close. Others are begrudgingly starting to accept this and trying to evolve their business models to compete with the momentum of Ubuntu.

We welcome it, after all, where is the fun in winning if you have no one to beat?

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With just a few days left for the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event at Barcelona, Canonical is pulling out all stops to show off Ubuntu Touch to the world. MWC takes place every year in February and is the world’s largest exhibition and conference congregation for the mobile industry.

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We've only hit February, and it already looks like 2014 is going to be the year of the open source phone. Not only is Android continuing to dominate the smartphone space in terms of market share, but Mozilla is widening its Firefox OS phone strategy and Canonical announced this week that Spain's bq and China's Meizu will be the first companies to bring Ubuntu smartphones to global users.

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Ubuntu users, I tell you this: good things come to those who wait. For all of you cheerful Ubuntu users, come 14.04, you’ll be able to choose whether or not you wish your application menus to appear globally or locally. With Locally Integrated Menus (coined by Unity Desktop member JohnLea), that will become possible.

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Some amazing news came down the pipeline today, from Ricardo Salveti of Canonical Ltd., for Ubuntu touch users and developers. Updates to the X86 emulator surfaced, which include increased TLS (Transport Layer Security) measures, and use of Qt packages that will be compatible with OpenGL 2.0. The combination of Qt packages and OpenGL ES 2.0 should produce sleeker rendering and font. Use of Open GL 2.0 brings programmable rendering pipelines, similar in fashion to OpenGL 3.0

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The first smartphones running Ubuntu will ship this year, Canonical now says – although the Linux vendor's hardware partners are hardly the first companies you might guess.

In January, Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon said that getting major carriers on board with the upstart mobile OS was "longer-term," and that the first Ubuntu smartphones would be built by small manufacturers who serve small regions. Apparently he wasn't kidding.

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"Apple just snapped up three year's worth of the supply of sapphire screens from the company that we had engaged to make the screens for the Edge," he said (at roughly the 30:45 mark linked to above). The report about the sapphire display comments first appeared at Gigaom.

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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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