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Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

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Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#31

Post by zanny »

plg wrote: post #6
bananas wrote: post #2

Really don't know what to do about 14.04 landing. I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop. 12.04 is EOL in 2017 and we plan to replace them next year (we operate a 3 year standard cycle). With the other major distributions moving towards systemd and eventually wayland (that includes the base of Ubuntu: Debian), I'm not sure I really want…

I also have concerns about this sort of thing. On the other hand as far as I can tell Ubuntu is still the easiest, fastest way to get a Desktop environment up and running on a new machine, one that looks decent (e.g. fonts) and one that plays nicely with hardware.

"plays nicely with hardware" isn't really an Ubuntu thing. Hell, some distributions like Manjaro and Mint play better with hardware by including proprietary graphics drivers on the disk if your system can't boot on Mesa. Ubuntu doesn't have that.

In my experience of Linux distros, Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Chakra, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, all the Linux derivatives like Zorin / Elementary / Mint / Bodhi, Crunchbang, etc all do the exact same thing and do it right:

Boot ISO, get live desktop, have a launchable guided installer. There are only a few such installers, a lot of distros reuse them (but some still duplicate the work needlessly) and they all perform relatively the same.

The outliers are your Arches, your non-live Debians (the default iso isn't live, for example) and your Gentoos, where you don't get a live desktop and have to do the routine manually.

> one that looks decent (e.g. fonts)

I've been installing Suse 12.3 and 13.1 a lot recently because I find a lot of users like Yast, and I think they have gotten their fonts pretty well in order. They used to be the poster child for bad font rendering, too.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#32

Post by bananas »

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #28
bananas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As follows: systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one. Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM…

Just wondering, do you think mir or x is installed on servers?

See my original post. I use a laptop and a desktop as well on LTS.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#33

Post by kylemaxwell »

bananas wrote: post #13
rlpb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is also now moving to systemd, following its Debian base: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 Assuming that you're not a toolkit (or further down the stack) developer, can you explain why Mir affects you? What other "Canonical worldview items" affect you?

As follows: systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one. Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM…

Why would you run a GUI on a server in the first place?

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#34

Post by Daviey »

rlpb wrote: post #24
forgotAgain wrote: post #10

Until now I agreed and have used Ubuntu for several years. I was however taken by surprise by how out of the mainstream Ubuntu seemed to security folks when Heartbleed was being identified and it's fix promulgated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244 It left me wondering if Redhat's contributions to the security community give it a leg up. Any "cloud platform of choice" needs to be a first tier security plat…

It isn't clear to me whether "which OpenSSL forwarded to Red Hat and others" includes Canonical or not. It is clear that Red Hat was included by that statement, but what makes you think that this is a bias in who received a direct notification, as opposed to a bias of the author of this particular article?

Mark J. Cox (RH) emailed the distro's mailing list inviting anyone on this very closed list to contact Red Hat SRT asking for details.

(http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/04/08/10)

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#35

Post by kapilvt »

duaneb wrote: post #15

Ubuntu is far too opinionated to be a stable "cloud platform".

yeah.. we should all use a distro based on something unopinionated.. like systemd ;-)

personally i'd rather benefit from solid pkg management with updates and bits available for free (as opposed to only paid subscriptions) and with wide availability of the same cloud images across cloud platforms (published by the distro themselves).

sometimes opinions are good and beneficial, and become widely adopted because its just a better way of doing things ergo, ubuntu cloudinit for declarative userdata based initialization of cloud instances, has promulgated far and wide across other distros and operating systems.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#36

Post by bananas »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #33
bananas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As follows: systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one. Mir affects me because of the inevitable safety in numbers that going with the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM…

Why would you run a GUI on a server in the first place?

"I maintain a few systems which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop machine and a laptop."

To quote myself...

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#37

Post by AceJohnny2 »

stephenr wrote: post #17
chronid wrote: post #3

I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments at least) is starting to tire me.

How about something new. Forget this idea of a company that produces yet another fucking distro with just enough changes so its not 100% compatible with whatever it's forked from, and then charge for support. How about a company that simply sells support services for an existing, community owned distro like Debian. If it makes sense for that company to donate to the Debian project, and/or hire staff to contribute to…

Huh, I thought I could easily list a dozen companies that will provide commercial support for Debian.

In the early 2000s, HP had committed to supporting Debian, but I no longer see it listed on their Linux Support page.

I know the european market has a healthy ecosystem of consultant companies that provide support for open source products.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

#40

Post by Daviey »

jcastro wrote: post #22
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But systemd isn't going to be in 14.04. Like bananas, over the next year we'll be moving our production servers off of 12.04. Whatever we switch to will be in production for 3-4 years. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to be stuck with upstart for another 3-4 years?

There are tons of production servers and laptops using upstart. It will take a while for Debian and Ubuntu to migrate to systemd so you're probably overthinking it. RHEL7 isn't out yet, what server distros can you run in production today that use systemd?

Not to mention... 'worldview' was OK, when RHEL6 was shipped with defaulting to upstart.. But then later NIH'ing to systemd? .. Even if Ubuntu hadn't committed to switching, suggesting that Upstart is anything other than a stellar contribution to FOSS is BS.

Whilst on the subject of world view, how is cloud-init working out? This is a Ubuntu technology that has become a defacto standard for ALL cloud images initialisation handling across every OS (incl. Windows!). With worldview like this, keep it up.

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