This week during the OpenStack conference in Boston, Canonical CEO Jane Silber revealed several new features that will be included in the next version of the company's Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.10. She also announced that both the desktop and the server editions will be released next Thursday, October 13.
According to Silber, Ubuntu 11.10 will arrive with support for ARM architecture, a new cloud service orchestration engine called JuJu, and the latest OpenStack cloud software called Diablo. But Silber also warned a captive audience during her presentation that the ARM version of Ubuntu is not completely polished.
"I know none of you are building your cloud on ARM architecture yet, but its a very promising architecture, and we're very proud to be working with the leaders in that part of the ecosystem to bring that new capability to the open source world first. It's a significant move," she said.
Silber also explained JuJu during her presentation: open source software developed by Canonical that can be used to automate the start-up and shutting down of cloud services running on OpenStack. She said that JuJu allows administrators to package all the routine actions that need to be taken to spin up a job on the machine.
"Think of services like [software] packages," Silber said. "On Ubuntu, ask for a package and it is there, You remove it and its gone. Services are the same way. When you ask for a service it is there, when you remove it, it is gone."
PC Advisor reports that Canonical also showcased on the show floor a server it hand-assembled that ran on an ARM processor.
