Canonical wants Netbook partners to open drivers for Ubuntu

We took our first look at components of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix last week shortly after it was announced at the Computex show in Taiwan. Canonical's original announcement provided little insight into plans for subnotebooks based on the software and left questions unanswered about how the Netbook Remix will be distributed, but a blog entry by Canonical boss Mark Shuttleworth offers some answers, along with news that Canonical will push hardware partners to release open source drivers.

Shuttleworth says that Canonical is currently collaborating with several hardware manufacturers (though he can't disclose their identities at this time) to create custom installation images that are tailored to particular mobile products. These installation images will focus on hardware-specific optimizations for increased performance, shorter boot times, and extended battery life. They will not be released to the public alongside the regular Ubuntu builds because they will contain third-party components that can't be freely redistributed (like proprietary drivers and Adobe's Flash plugin). Since the optimizations are based on very specific hardware configurations, Canonical will not be releasing a generic Netbook Remix version alongside other flavors of Ubuntu.

"The netbook remix is not part of the 'official Ubuntu editions,' it's not like Kubuntu or Ubuntu or Ubuntu Server. It's a separate remix published by the Canonical OEM team. It will probably get revved in October when Ubuntu 8.10 is released, but that's up to the Canonical OEM team and their customers, and not the responsibility of the Ubuntu project team," Shuttleworth wrote. "In working with manufacturers, the OEM team creates custom install images which are specific to hardware from those OEMs."

Canonical is also making the open source components of the Netbook Remix widely available, which means that they can easily be rolled upstream or incorporated into community-driven Ubuntu derivatives like Eeebuntu. Currently, the open source components are primarily user interface enhancements that increase the usability of devices with small screens. As we demonstrated last week, these can already be added to a standard Ubuntu 8.04 installation.

Although Canonical is actively releasing the public components of the Netbook Remix under the GPL, hardware makers will obviously be the ones who decide whether to release their own drivers as open source. Shuttleworth says that Canonical strongly encourages open driver development.

"We take the strong view that drivers are best developed in the open and contributed to the mainline kernel. Western companies (Intel in particular) have embraced this approach to good effect, and we hope this leads to a measurable advantage in design wins for those companies," Shuttleworth wrote in a comment on his blog entry. "We often find, however, that some companies adopt a proprietary approach initially, then open up as they start to understand the pace of change in Linux, and with that, appreciate the real benefits to them of openness."

The revelation of OEM partnerships implies that we will likely see the Netbook Remix on upcoming subnotebook devices from mainstream hardware vendors. In light of Dell's existing relationship with Canonical, the recently unveiled mini laptop from Dell is a likely candidate for Ubuntu Netbook adoption. What we have seen so far of the software is impressive, and the final product will likely be a lot more polished than current options like the flavor of Xandros that Asus ships on the Eee.

Canonical wants Netbook partners to open drivers for Ubuntu

By Ryan Paul | Published: June 10, 2008

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Pop!_OS Update Makes (Some) Computers Faster

Image
A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based   Pop!_OS   distro could make a big impact on system performance. Pop!_OS now enables  zram  support by default — and to  quote Sytem76  themselves the feature  “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.” Pretty nice, eh? Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games. Though I’m yet to try it on Pop!_OS, zram is something I use on several devices as  Fedora enabled zram  a few years back. Though I don’t come bearing any graphs to back the enthusiasm up, it’s something I definitely  think  I feel the benefit of, even for basic computing needs. Still, it’s not just thos
Read more

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice, due on 17th April 2014

Image
Canonical today announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be released on 17th April 2014, bringing a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years. “Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical. Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu. “Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubun
Read more

Ubuntu’s New Installer is Shaping Up Nicely

Image
  Ubuntu’s been working on its   new OS installer   for a couple years, now it looks like the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’ release will finally ship it by default. The latest pending  Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds  use the reworked installer by default, and is expected to power the default install experience of the Ubuntu 23.03 beta in March. Thing is, despite the fact the installer is built using an entirely different toolkit ( Flutter ) and now leverages the Ubuntu’s  server-based  Subiquity  and  Curtin  efforts, it doesn’t look  that  different to the existing one. In fact, if no-one told you the installer was rebuilt you’d probably never tell. The new installer was available to test in previous versions of Ubuntu using a special ‘canary’ ISO, and is also  available as a Snap  app you can run (but shouldn’t) on an existing Ubuntu install. Now the Flutter-based front-end has filtered out in the official daily builds — so let’s go hands on to see how it performs! Ubuntu’s New In
Read more