Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Updates Take Canonical Beyond the Desktop

In little more than a month, the latest release of Ubuntu, 12.04 LTS, will be upon us. As we’ve already noted, it brings a lot of new features to the desktop. But since PCs are only a fraction of the Ubuntu universe, we’d be remiss not to take stock of the updates that 12.04 will usher in on servers, the cloud and beyond. Here’s a look.

If you’re in search of radical change, of course, Ubuntu 12.04 is not the place to find it. As an LTS release, this latest version of the operating system promises polish and enhancements to software that already exists more than the introduction of new features. Although the desktop version of Precise will usher in a surprising number of changes, other variants of the release are predictably more conservative on the feature front.

New in 12.04

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new beyond the desktop. In particular, look for the following key updates to other iterations of Ubuntu:

• On Ubuntu Server: OpenStack, Ubuntu’s cloud infrastructure of choice, has been updated; the Keystone authentication package has switched to Keystone-light; and the LXC interface for controlling virtualization containers has been enhanced. In addition, a number of software packages in the server distribution have been updated to their latest upstream versions.
• Mythbuntu, a spin of Ubuntu tailored to the MythTV DVR system, will sport MythTV version 0.25, which introduces a string of new features including but not limited to the MythTV Services API, IPV6 support, better metadata management for media files and streaming from iOS devices. Mythbuntu already lets geeks — and sometimes even normal people, too — do an impressive number of things with their media collections, but this new release promises to open up yet more opportunities for playing and working.
• Ubuntu Core, a minimalist Ubuntu image designed for embedded devices, has added support for the ARMv7 hard float architecture. Otherwise, however, there’s not too much new here.
• For the cloud, beta packages of Hadoop for Ubuntu will be available via PPA.
• More generally, there are a number of changes to the back end that will affect all variants of Ubuntu, but may be of particular interest to system administrators. These include conformance to the Debian convention of putting user accounts with sudo privileges into the “sudo” group instead of “admin,” automatic installation of language-support packages when new software is added to the system and the management of resolv.conf via the resolvconf package.

This list isn’t long, as indeed the number of new features — even minor ones — that will hit non-desktop variants of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is pretty minimal. In most areas users can look forward instead to more polish and stability, and wait for the 12.10 release in the fall for more exciting updates.

All the same, the updates that will be debuting beyond the desktop serve as reminders that Canonical — despite Ubuntu’s status as one of the world’s leading open source desktop operating system — also has its toes in many different waters. Ubuntu has never been only about the desktop, and likely never will be, especially now as the platforms expands into the realm of TVs, phones and beyond.