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Canonical has just announced Landscape 1.4. This allows you to manage and monitor groups of servers in your business. They also now offer a dedicated landscape server for inside your organisation. <original here>

Cloud management dominates the theme for Landscape 1.4 with new features that allow you to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as easily as you manage your instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC from within Landscape. Users simply enter their credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or EC2 at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same page allowing you manage all your physical, virtuali and Cloud instances in one place.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to minimise the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts in the future.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to tag computers performing the same function and update them with a single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags, assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you can use what ever criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at www.canonical.com/landscape

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

Well worth a look!

For those of you currently using Dropbox, an online storage drive for your personal files, and wanting to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 you may hit some problems if you try and install the 9.04 deb file. The program may start but never prompt you for a username and password and just crash out. However all is not lost, there is a away round it as Dropbox offer a source download for the non proprietary bits and will download the other required parts itself. Heres how to get it all working again.

1. First lets get some required software packages.

sudo apt-get install wget build-essential libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

2. Now lets get the source.

sudo su -p

cd /usr/src/

wget https://www.getdropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2

3. Unpack

tar xvfj nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2

4. Compile

cd nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1

./configure

make

make install

5. Your now ready to run Dropbox from Applications > Internet > Dropbox

Hope that helps a few people. Enjoy!

I’ve started work on creating some debian/ubuntu packages of Garlik’s 4store RDF database, currently there is source and soon there will be some RPM’s, so I thought I’d help bring  .deb’s to the party. The guys from Garlik are very helpful and can be contacted in #4store on freenode. According to their site:

4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people.

I’m looking at this product to build the core of system that will help create a scalable, repeatable, easy to use data store system. The idea behind this is to help organisations achieve the goal of opening their data. @johnlsheridan stated that open source is the perfect system for promoting and achieving the goal of open data and open standards, all three go hand in hand. My aim is to remove the “black magic” currently involved in setting up some of these systems and help people free their data easily, which should benefit us all in the long run.

4store has some very interesting features such as the ability of nodes to clustering database nodes for scalability. It also has a SPARQL http server which provides a RESTful API. The fact that all the data can be accessed by a URI means this data is cacheable, which in turn means you can scale this system very easily with proxies and load balancers. The beauty of the system though is that none of these extra features are a requirement, so if your a small organisation with a moderate amount of data you don’t need to break the bank to do it.

Why free your data?

Well data is key for communication and the traditional business model is to guard your data and protect it. However the internet generation is here, and they’re changing the world! As soon as you put your data in a open standard anyone can use it. Using linked data means that someone looking for information about a certain item can find your data easier and more importantly can be interpreted by machines easily which improves search algorithms. If this item searched for is a product it may get you a sale. If the item is data about health it might even save a life. Data is diverse and so is its uses, when you open your data people may find a new way of using it and progress is made. Opening your data allows people create mashups and pull in data from a multitude of sources, giving a accurate and informative view on the requested subject matter. Open source, open data and open standards if embraced by enough people will help everyone move forward. I’ve only skimmed the surface of what these systems can be used for and trying to describe the importance of open data is incredibly difficult because data can be anything! If you want to know more I’d suggest looking at these TED speaches:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

and an excellent example of open data in use:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Hello one and all,

I’m visiting Ubuntu on Friday and whilst there I’ve been asked to take part in a “Conversation with Canonical Design team”. They are looking for ideas and design features we would like to see improved or changed. So if anyone has any suggestions I’d be more than happy to put them forward to the guys at Canonical.

Feel free to drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do.

Ric

I’ve recently been playing with UbuntuOne. For those who don’t know UbuntuOne is a new service from canonical (the creator Ubuntu) which gives you a virtual online drive, this integrates with your desktop and allows you to access your files via a web interface whilst away from your PC. You can think of it as a virtual USB thumb drive. Installing this service on multiple Ubuntu desktops allows you sync files between desktops seamlessly. If you’ve ever used Dropbox, the service will feel very familiar, but there are some differences. At the time of writing this article UbuntuOne is in beta, so I’m expecting some improvements and extra features before the final release.

The free accounts for both UbuntuOne and Dropbox are 2GB in size which should be enough to sync important documents and some photo’s. Both services also offer a pay monthly service to increase your space, Dropbox offers 50GB for $9.99 a month and 100GB for $19.99 a month, these packages make Canonical’s offering of 10GB for $10 a month look a little puny. Currently there is no support for other operating systems from UbuntuOne where as Dropbox offers clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. I personally feel Canonical need’s to address this, it’s a fantastic feature that could allow users a easier transition between OS’s, which could help more people convert to Ubuntu in the long run. One thing UbuntuOne does do very nicely is, ingrate with your desktop, however I would like the option to choose where to store files locally. That feature is especially usefull if your running a netbook with a small SSD card in. Dropbox allowed me to store files on a much larger SD card slotted into my device.

On installing Dropbox you need to suply your login details, however UbuntuOne manages this authentication in a much more web 2.0 fashion. Once installed you are asked on a web page to authorise the machine you are using, this is all intergrated with your launchpad account. This hole process is very smooth and very easy. Both services allow you to access your files by a web gui, so if your away from your PC and need to pull down that important file you have forgotten you can! I’ve attached a screenshot of the UbuntuOne web gui for you to see:

UbuntuOne Beta Web GUI

I’ve seen several improvements in both the web gui and the client software in the past couple of weeks and the developers seem very receptive to feedback with is a real bonus these days and shows Canonical’s continued open source mentality, even though this is a proprietory service. I hope in the next few weeks/months we’ll see leaps and bounds and this service will become everything Dropbox is and maybe more, it already shows great promise with its desktop intergration and as the release candiates near who knows what treats are instore.

What can I say apart from I’m very impressed with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix. I found the whole experience far better than 8.10 which left me with sound card driver bugs and strange display errors. All of these were all fixable and easy enough to do but I want my Ubuntu to work out the box, and Jaunty seems to have delivered this!

Installation.

Installation was incredibly easy. I downloaded the netbook remix usb image from:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

I had a 1gb USB pen drive handy and copied the image onto that using the dd command.

dd bs=1M if=<IMAGE-NAME>.img of=/dev/<USB DEVICE>

There are easier ways to install the image to usb disk and instructions can be found here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles

Its then a simple case of booting your netbook from USB and following the instructions. Basically its a set of multiple choice questions asking about time zone’s, keyboard lay out and the such. If your not familiar with installing Linux, make the sensible choices for language and keyboard and leave the rest as default.

Now I’m lucky enough to have one of the supported models, in this case a Dell Mini 9. Everything worked out of the box, graphics, sound, webcam, wifi, card reader and bluetooth. I was very impressed that there was zero tinkering to be done.

The only tinkering I did was to choose EXT4 for the file system as I wanted to give this a go and see if there were any speed improvements, over the standard install of EXT3. You can choose this by selecting advanced on the disk partitioner.

Running.

Now there has been a lot of hype about how quickly Ubuntu 9.04 boots and especially when you use EXT4 as your file system. I must admit I was slightly sceptical. However I was pleasantly surprised! I’m seeing boot times of around 19-20 seconds which is pretty amazing and lets you boot up at a whim quickly, which is great for using your netbook quickly whilst on the move.

The user interface is pretty different from a normal Linux desktop and your presented with a nice control panel that allows you quick access to everything installed either by using the small track pad or keyboard strokes. Apart from the nice GUI with easily accessible icons you get the usual run of tools, openoffice.org, firefox, evolution mail etc etc, which gives you basically everything you need for a mobile office. You also get cheese the new gnome application which uses the inbuilt webcam to take and apply effects to pictures of yourself. I did install a couple of extra media components in the form of vlc in order to watch some xvid encoded videos on the train.

sudo apt-get install vlc

Everything had a real slick finish to it and Jaunty is looking very polished. I was VERY impressed when I plugged in a USB 3G card this was instantly recognised. All I had to do was tell it my mobile/cell network provider and I was connected within 2 or 3 clicks. Having used this same dongle on Windows and Mac, Ubuntu beats the easy of use by 10 fold.

I then chose to install dropbox which is a third party piece of software not available via apt-get. Dropbox allows you to have a online web drive which adds some extra space to your netbook. I just have the free 2GB account, which for me is more than enough. You can download it here:

http://www.getdropbox.com

I’d also suggest opening up firefox and visiting your normal sites to make sure you have all the installed plugging you need whilst your on a connection at home rather than trying to pulled down flash over a 3G network.

Improvements?

One thing that I felt was missing is an easy way to switch between netbook desktop and traditional desktop. This feature would be great, and I fully admit may already be there but I couldn’t see how to do it easily. I’d find this feature really useful especially when plugging the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard, in order to use as a traditional desktop.

Round up.

Just try it for yourself! Hopefully you’ll be as pleased as me. If you do have problems hop onto the ubuntu forums and I’m sure people will be more than happy to help.