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 ;-)

Container MacCloud: Can there really only be one?

Dear Mr. Highlander aka Connor MacLeod,

Are you really sure there can only be one?  Because we're on an IBM LinuxOne right now, and there actually seems to be many, many more than one...

We're running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS here on this s390x z/VM guest and yeah, you might say "it's a kind of magic!"


In fact, we've had our own quickening, having launched thousands of Docker containers, and thousands more LXD machines, all talking to one another on this enormous mainframe.

We know you're immortal and all, born in 1518 on the shores of Loch Shiel, but I mean, even you would appreciate these machines have uptimes measured in decades, right?

And we also know that you have power beyond imagination, you feel everything and know everything, but we're fast learners too!  We're using our new Ubuntu on POWER8 with big data and applied machine learning, to try and make the world a smarter planet and a better place.

Moreover, we don't want to conceal our special gift -- we want to share it with everyone!  Ubuntu on IBM mainframes and POWER8 servers are available to all.

Anyway, we'll see one another at the Gathering, I'm sure.  I hope the prize is a brand new LinuxOne.  But I hope the Kurgan doesn't win it, as we would all hate to see mortal man suffer an eternity of darkness.  That would be a bummer.

Until then, perhaps you'll join us and learn more in this webinar!

And so now it ends...
Container MacCloud