Today Dell announced its official re-entry into the Linux laptop market. Project Sputnik, first announced in May, is graduating from Dell’s internal incubator program into a real product. According to project lead Barton Geroge, Dell will sell a special “developer edition” of its XPS13 Ultrabook starting this fall.
The laptop will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu, a user friendly distribution of the open source operating system Linux (or GNU/Linux to purists). George said the laptop won’t be able to dual boot Windows. But Dell made available an Ubuntu install image customized for the XPS13, so you could buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu yourself if you require dual booting. George says the developer version will be the high end configuration of the XPS13, with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state hard drive. This model currently sells for $1,499, and George says the Linux version will sell for a little bit less than the Windows version.
Dell started offering systems with Linux pre-installed back in 2007, due to popular demand on its online suggestion box IdeaStorm. But the company quietly stopped advertising Ubuntu as an option on its online store sometime in 2010. The Ubuntu option was too confusing to average users. “It wasn’t reaching the right audience,” George explains.
But the demand from power users never really went away. Since the original announcement of Project Sputnik Dell has gathered extensive feedback on IdeaStorm – enough, George says, to justify bringing a Linux laptop back into production. He says that although Dell hasn’t fully decided how to market the new product, it will be more clear to buyers that this is a computer for power users.
Dell won’t be alone in the Linux laptop market. There are several “white box” vendors offering Linux laptops, but no major vendor is selling fully featured (non-netbook) machines with Linux pre-installed. The closest thing is EmperorLinux, which installs Linux on laptops manufactured by major vendors and sells them along with technical support (check out this site for a round-up of Linux laptop vendors).
With growing concern about locked bootloaders on Window 8 machines possibly preventing users from installing Linux or other alternative operating systems it’s refreshing to see a major vendor promoting computational freedom.
AppDirect, a company that offers white-label cloud-based app stores, has today announced $8.5 million in funding to ride the wave of interest in cloud services and continue its expansion in partnership with third parties. And today the company also announced a new customer in that strategy: Rackspace, which has launched the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, an online store for cloud-based software and services to more than 180,000 Rackspace customers worldwide.
The Series A round was led by iNovia Capital with participation from existing investors, and comes on the back of a seed round of $3.25 million raised last year.
Cloud services have been steadily picking up momentum in the enterprise — Gartner just the other week noted that they will be the fastest growing segment of enterprise services in the years ahead and will total $109 billion this year.
It’s been a few months since the International Trade Commission affirmed its decision to ban a selection of Motorola‘s Android portfolio from import, but the ruling will only start in earnest from today. While the ITC mentioned the likes of the Google-powered Atrix, Xoom, Droid 2 — alongside a whole pile of lesser-known models– the exclusion covers all Motorola devices that infringe on Microsoft’s patents for email-based meeting scheduling. Motorola has stated that it has already been proactive in ensuring its phones remain available in the US — the ruling won’t affect devices already in stock.
In its own words: “In view of the ITC exclusion order which becomes effective Wednesday with respect to the single ActiveSync patent upheld in Microsoft’s ITC-744 proceeding, Motorola has taken proactive measures to ensure that our industry-leading smartphones remain available to consumers in the U.S. We respect the value of intellectual property and expect other companies to do the same.”
Import ban on select Motorola Android products starts today originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple uses the ARM architecture for its chip sets on its iPhones and tablets. Now we are seeing the first uses for ARM-powered architectures on servers to power cloud environments.
Contributors to OpenStack have developed the first ARM powered OpenStack cloud as a zone in TryStack.org, the free sandbox for exploring and testing OpenStack.
The ramifications are evident in a few ways:
The high costs of managing energy hungry servers will drive ARM adoption. Power and cooling costs dominate a server’s cost of ownership. It is more than the cost of the hardware itself by a factor of seven. According to ARMdevices.net, IDC reports that all servers worldwide consumed $44.5 Billion of electricity in 2010 and required ten additional Gigawatt power plants to be constructed.
The Calexeda blog frames the issue well:
In today’s cloud architectures, virtualization is used as a means to provide elasticity, dynamic workload management, and multi-tenant security, all while sharing the same underlying physical systems (which tend to be very large servers). What if, however, we took an opposite approach and were able to provide the same benefits through the use of many smaller servers – a phrase some have coined as physicalization. Suddenly, we move back to a model of dedicated hosting and guaranteed performance, but with the same on-demand access and cloud-based pricing customers are accustomed to. As long as the end-user gets access to a compute resource, and the economics of the infrastructure make sense for the cloud provider, this could ultimately be a win-win for the future of cloud computing.
OpenStack is experimenting with these bare metal servers. The work points to the rise of the ARM-powered cloud and a coming move away from clouds dominated by high-end servers.
It’s been a busy month already in the world of the open cloud, not least because of OpenStack’s two-year anniversary this week. For those interested in that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) framework, the OSCON conference includes several sessions on this topic.
OpenStack is by no means the only contender in the open cloud space, however, and rival OpenNebula last week celebrated what may well be an equally significant milestone. Specifically, it launched a fresh new version of its widely used and fully open source cloud platform.
OpenNebula 3.6, which is the twelfth stable release of the platform, offers a raft of new features including virtual machine (VM) rescheduling, new quota and accounting tools, and integration with OpenNebula’s new virtual appliance marketplace, to name just a few.
“This release is focused on stabilizing the features introduced in OpenNebula 3.4, improving the performance of some existing features, and adding new features for virtualization management and integration with the new OpenNebula Marketplace,” wrote Ruben S. Montero, the project’s chief architect, in a blog post last week.
Ready for some more specifics? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the highlights you’ll find in this new release.
1. A New Hotplug Feature
Nicknamed “Lagoon” after the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius, OpenNebula 3.6 includes several new capabilities designed to help manage private clouds based on KVM, Xen, and VMware. A new hotplug mechanism for disk volumes, for instance, supports the attachment of either volatile volumes or existing images to a running virtual machine.
2. Rewritten Tools
Also part of OpenNebula 3.6 are quota and accounting tools that have been completely rewritten and are now included in the OpenNebula core for better integration with the existing AuthZ and AuthN mechanisms as well as other related tools, such as OpenNebula’s Sunstone graphical interface.
3. Advanced Capabilities
Further enriching OpenNebula 3.6 are the addition of VM rescheduling, hard reboots, cloning of disk images, and support for per-cluster definition of system data stores.
4. SunStone Improvements
OpenNebula Sunstone, the platform’s Cloud Operations Center GUI, has also been improved in this new release with several redesigned tabs, Montero noted. In the platform’s OpenNebula Zones component, meanwhile, “we got rid of the data-mapper dependency to ease the packaging of OpenNebula,” he explained.
5. Marketplace Integration
Finally, OpenNebula 3.6 is fully integrated with OpenNebula Marketplace, a new online catalog launched last month that’s designed to make it quick and easy for users to find and distribute virtual appliances that are ready to run on OpenNebula clouds. As a result, “any user of an OpenNebula cloud can easily find and deploy appliances in a single click, and any software developer can distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide in few minutes,” the project explains.
With more than 5,000 downloads per month, OpenNebula boasts deployments including CERN, FermiLab, ESA, RIM, China Mobile, Telefonica O2, and KPMG. A certified commercial version with long-term support is also available from C12G Labs, the Madrid-based company behind the project.
OpenNebula 3.6 is a final release intended for production environments, so users of previous versions are advised to upgrade. A full list of the platform’s new features is available on the project website, as is a link for downloads.
