By the numbers: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

I happen to have a full mirror of the entire Ubuntu Xenial archive here on a local SSD, and I took the opportunity to run a few numbers...

• 6: This is our 6th Ubuntu LTS
• 6.06, 8.04, 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 16.04
• 7: With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, we're supporting 7 CPU architectures
• armhf, arm64, i386, amd64, powerpc, ppc64el, s390x
• 25,671: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is comprised of 25,671 source packages
• main, universe, restricted, multiverse
• 150,562+: Over 150,562 (and counting!) cloud instances of Xenial have launched to date
• and we haven't even officially released yet!
• 216,475: A complete archive of all binary .deb packages in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS consists of 216,475 debs.
• 24,803 arch independent
• 27,159 armhf
• 26,845 arm64
• 28,730 i386
• 28,902 amd64
• 27,061 powerpc
• 26,837 ppc64el
• 26,138 s390x
• 1,426,792,926: A total line count of all source packages in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using cloc yields 1,426,792,926 total lines of source code
• 250,478,341,568: A complete archive all debs, all architectures in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS requires 250GB of disk space

Yes, that's 1.4 billion lines of source code comprising the entire Ubuntu 16.04 LTS archive.  What an amazing achievement of open source development!

Perhaps my fellow nerds here might be interested in a breakdown of all 1.4 billion lines across 25K source packages, and throughout 176 different programming languages, as measured by Al Danial's cloc utility.  Interesting data!

You can see the full list here.  What further insight can you glean?

:-Dustin

PHP7 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

I feel like I sort of "grew up" on PHP!

I certainly earned some spending money in high school and beer money in college (1997-2001) through a series of side jobs, building websites in PHP and Postgres, at least one of which is still up and going strong -- DivItUp.com.  So yeah, PHP sort of holds a soft spot in my heart.

One of the newest members of the Ubuntu Server Team at Canonical, Nish Aravamudan, has worked hard this cycle in merging PHP7 into Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.  In doing so, he's worked with Zend and the upstream PHP developers as well as Ondřej Surý and Debian to ensure an outstanding PHP experience in Ubuntu, as always.

In doing so, we have now comprehensively bumped all of PHP and its libraries from PHP5 to PHP7 in Xenial.  And it's available on every Ubuntu architecture -- amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el, s390x.

As such, PHP7 will be the only version of PHP supported in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

If you have a hard dependency on PHP5, then you should either remain on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty), which is supported for another 3 years.  Or better yet, perhaps you should have a look at LXD!  Yeah, just drop your legacy PHP5 code into a LXD container running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  You might even be interested in the adapt package which makes this even easier for you.  Seriously, LXD is awesome for exactly this use case!

However, I suspect your experience might be very similar to mine...  You see, I have a bunch of PHP code that I wrote like 12+ years ago, that largely "just works" and I never, ever, ever have to touch.  You can find a couple of those projects packaged in Ubuntu, like Pictor and Musica.  Once Nish got all of my PHP library dependencies packaged (libapache2-mod-php, php-cli, php-imagick, php-getid3), my decade-old PHP code just worked!

I'm actually really impressed with the PHP community here.  I love that my ancient PHP code continues to "just work" with the new PHP7 engine.  [Deleted a lengthy grumble about all of my Python2.x code that had to change to run under Python3...]

And not only did it just work, it's actually faster than ever before.  PHP7 at its core is  faster than ever before.  Check out the info graphic below for more info!

Cheers,
Dustin

p.s. And if you're looking for Drupal, Nish is hard at work, trying to get Drupal8 into Ubuntu 16.04 LTS too ;-)

Snappy Ubuntu for Devices -- The Year of the Linux Countertop!

Forget about The Year of the Linux Desktop...This is The Year of the Linux Countertop!

I'm talking about Linux on every form of Internet-connected embedded devices.  The Internet-of-Things is already upon us.  Sensors, smart watches, TVs, thermostats, security cameras, drones, printers, routers, switches, robots -- you name it.  

And with that backdrop, we are thrilled to introduce Snappy Ubuntu for Devices.  Ubuntu is now a possibility, on almost any device, anywhere.  Now that's exciting!

This is the same Snappy Ubuntu, with its atomic, transactional updates that we launched on each major public cloud last month -- extended and updated for 64-bit Intel, AMD and ARM devices.

You can check out the official landing page for a comprehensive list of already-enabled devices and services, including: Ninjablocks, openHAB, Open Source Robotics Foundation, Robot Operating System, Erle Robotics, Odroid, Beagleboard, Udoo, Parallella, PCDuino, Banana Pro, Allwinner, DeviceHive, IoTSys, RIOT, Resin.io, Kaa, Nwave, Siralab, OpenSensors.io, Weave, 2lemetry.

Now, if you want a detailed, developer's look at building a Snappy Ubuntu image and running it on a BeagleBone, you're in luck!  I shot this little instructional video (using Cheese, GTK-RecordMyDesktop, and OpenShot).  Enjoy!

A transcript of the video follows...

1. What is Snappy Ubuntu?
• A few weeks ago, we introduced a new flavor of Ubuntu that we call “Snappy” -- an atomically, transactionally updated Operating System -- and showed how to launch, update, rollback, and install apps in cloud instances of Snappy Ubuntu in Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine public clouds.
• And now we’re showing how that same Snappy Ubuntu experience is the perfect operating system for today’s Cambrian Explosion of smart devices that some people are calling “the Internet of Things”!
• Snappy Ubuntu Core bundles only the essentials of a modern, appstore powered Linux OS stack and hence leaves room both in size as well as flexibility to build, maintain and monetize very own device solution without having to care about the overhead of inventing and maintaining your own OS and tools from scratch. Snappy Ubuntu Core comes right in time for you to put your very own stake into stake into still unconquered worlds of things
• We think you’ll love Snappy on your smart devices for many of the same reasons that there are already millions of Ubuntu machine instances in hundreds of public and private clouds, as well as the millions of your own Ubuntu desktops, tablets, and phones!
2. Unboxing the BeagleBone
• Our target hardware for this Snappy Ubuntu demo is the BeagleBone Black -- an inexpensive, open platform for hardware and software developers.
• I paid $55 for the board, and $8 for a USB to TTL Serial Cable
• The board is about the size of a credit card, has a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, and on board ethernet.
• While Snappy Ubuntu will run on most any armhf or amd64 hardware (including the Intel NUC), the BeagleBone is perhaps the most developer friendly solution.
3. The easiest way to get your Snappy Ubuntu running on your Beaglebone
• The world of Devices has so many opportunities that it won’t be possible to give everyone the perfect vertical stack centrally. Hence Canonical is trying to enable all of you and provide you with the elements that get you started doing your innovation as quickly as possible. Since there will be many devices that won’t need a screen and input devices, we have developed “webdm”. webdm gives you the ability to manage your snappy device and consume apps without any development effort.
• To installl you simply download our prebuilt WEB .img and dd it to your sd card.
• After that all you ahve to do is to connect your beaglebone to a DHCP enabled local network and power it on.
• After 1-2 minutes you go to http://webdm.local:8080 and can get onto installing apps from the snappy appstore without any further effort
• Of course, we are still in beta and will continue give you more features and a greater experience over time; we will not only make the UI better, but also work on various customization options that allow you to deliver your own app store powered product without investing your development resources in something that already got solved.
4. Downloading Snappy and writing to an sdcard
• Now we’re going to build a Snappy Ubuntu image to run on our device.
• Soon, we’ll publish a library of Snappy Ubuntu images for many popular devices, but for this demo, we’re going to roll our own using the tool, ubuntu-device-flash.
• ls -halF mysnappy.img
• sudo dd if=mysnappy.img of=/dev/mmblk0 bs=1M oflag=dsync
5. Hooking up the BeagleBone
• Insert the microsd card
• Network cable
• USB debug
• Power/USB
6. Booting Snappy and command line experience
• Okay, so we’re ready for our first boot of Snappy!
• Let’s attach to the USB/serial console using screen
• Now, I’ll attach the power, and if you watch very carefully, you might get to see some a few boot messages.
• snappy help
• ifconfig
• ssh ubuntu@10.0.0.105
7. WebDM experience
• snappy info
• Shows we have the webdm framework installed
• point browser to http://10.0.0.105:8080
• Configuration
• Store
8. Conclusion
• Hey how cool is that!  Snappy Ubuntu running on devices :-)
• I’ve spent plenty of time and money geeking out over my Nest and Dropcam and Netatmo and WeMo lightswitches, playing with their APIs and hooking them up to If-This-Then-That.
• But I’m really excited about a world where those types of devices are as accessible to me as my Ubuntu servers and desktops!
• And from what I’ve shown you here, with THIS, I think we can safely say that that we’ve blown right past the year of the Linux desktop.
• This is the year of the Linux countertop!

Cheers,

Dustin

Video Podcast with Amber Graner

I spent a good half hour on Monday morning with Amber Graner of Linaro.  This was my first experience with G+ On Air, a mechanism for conducting video interviews over G+ Hangouts and record them for rebroadcast over YouTube later.

I've known Amber for nearly 4 years now, and she's such a warm, fun, and energetic person.  I'm always humbled by her interest and willingness to branch out and learn about new technologies.  She's truly an inspiration for us all :-)

In this interview, we talked about Linaro, ARM, Android, Ubuntu, Cloud, Gazzang, Encryption, eCryptfs, and (of course) Byobu :-)  Enjoy!




:-Dustin

Ubuntu ARM Servers -- At last!!!

for Ubuntu Servers

I've long had a personal interest in the energy efficiency of the Ubuntu Server.  This interest has manifested in several ways.  From founding the PowerNap Project to using tiny netbooks and notebooks as servers, I'm just fascinated with the idea of making computing more energy efficient.

It wasn't so long ago, in December 2008 at UDS-Jaunty in Mountain View that I proposed just such a concept, and was nearly ridiculed out of the room.  (Surely no admin in his right mind would want enterprise infrastructure running on ARM processors!!! ...  Um, well, yeah, I do, actually....)  Just a little over two years ago, in July 2009, I longed for the day when Ubuntu ARM Servers might actually be a reality...

My friends, that day is here at last!  Ubuntu ARM Servers are now quite real!


The affable Chris Kenyon first introduced the world to Canonical's efforts in this space with his blog post, Ubuntu Server for ARM Processors a little over a week ago.  El Reg picked up the story quickly, and broke the news in Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars.   And ZDNet wasn't far behind, running an article this week, Ubuntu Linux bets on the ARM server.  So the cat is now officially out of the bag -- Ubuntu Servers on ARM are here :-)

Looking for one?  This Geek.com article covers David Mandala's 42-core ARM cluster, based around TI Panda boards.  I also recently came across the ZT Systems R1801e Server, boasting 8 x Dual ARM Cortex A9 processors.  The most exciting part is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.  We've partnered with companies like Calxeda (here in Austin) and others to ensure that the ARM port of the Ubuntu Server will be the most attractive OS option for quite some time.

A huge round of kudos goes to the team of outstanding engineers at Canonical (and elsewhere) doing this work.  I'm sure I'm leaving off a ton of people (feel free to leave comments about who I've missed), but the work that's been most visible to me has been by:

• Michael Casadevall, Oliver Grawert, and David Mandala (leading and manning the ARM/Server/Toolchain bits)
• Serge Hallyn (hacking on LXC as a container solution on the virt-less platform)
• Chuck Short and Dave Walker (OpenStack, libvirt, qemu ARM support)
• Ben Howard (Cloud images for Ubuntu ARM)

So I'm looking forward to reducing my servers' energy footprint...are you?

:-Dustin