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Mark Shuttleworth recently downplayed the likelihood that Ubuntu would turn into a true rolling-release distribution, but that changes were likely abound. He's now written another blog post about considerations being made at the company for future Ubuntu Linux releases...

It’s been two weeks since Rick Spencer made the case for a rolling release approach in Ubuntu. Having a rolling release is one of the very top suggestions from the hardcore Ubuntu user community, and after years of it being mooted by all and sundry I thought it deserved the deep consideration that Rick and his team, who represent most of Canonical’s direct contributions to Ubuntu, brought to the analysis.

It’s obviously not helpful to have mass hysteria break out when ideas like this get floated, so I would like to thank everyone who calmly provided feedback on the proposal, and blow a fat raspberry at those of you who felt obliged to mount soapboxes and opine on The End Of the World As We Know It. Sensible people the world over will appreciate the dilemma at being asked to take user feedback seriously, and being accused of unilateralism when exploring options.

Change is warranted. If we want to deliver on our mission, we have to be willing to stare controversy in the face and do the right thing anyway, recognising that we won’t know if it’s the right thing until much later, and for most of the intervening time, friends and enemies alike will go various degrees of apoplectic. Our best defense against getting it wrong is to have a strong meritocracy, which I think we do. That means letting people like Rick, who have earned their leadership roles, explore controversial territory.

So, where do we stand? And where do I stand? What’s the next step?

Mark Shuttleworth has irritated some open-source developers by his latest claim: Ubuntu's Unity existed before the GNOME Shell...

Here's some of the first OpenGL benchmarks of the ultra high-end $999 (USD) NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN running on Linux...

Nobody wants to give the man (the enterprise), the right to see what's on their phone and wipe it at will if they feel it's been compromised. One way to allevate that is to containerize or partition the corporate data so if the relationship ends or the phone gets lost or stolen, IT simply shuts off access to enterprise data. Your vacation pictures and other personal data remain intact.

Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.

So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself. That’s OK. If you really care about free (as in freedom) desktop computing, upstream is where you should be. Not an upstream just for Ubuntu Phone/Tablet, but an upstream for every(damn)body.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 6.4 install media for i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 6.4 is based on the upstream release EL 6.4 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared with the past CentOS 6 releases, and we highly recommend that everyone study the release notes as well as the upstream technical notes about the changes and how they might impact your installation. Everyone who has centos-cr repositories enabled and in use would already be running CentOS 6.4 as of two weeks ago.

McAfee has released new security software for Android-based embedded devices. Application Control for Android is claimed to be the only kernel-level security solution for protecting devices running embedded Android from installing or executing malicious apps.

The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face-to-face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other developers.

Did you ever think that Canonical/Ubuntu’s massive ambitions and accelerated technical path toward them just might work? Ubuntu is always in the position of making its future users happy. Whether the same things bring present users happiness is another matter. Always has been.

Open Source software has had a special area for itself at the CeBIT trade show for the last five years. The H went along to see what was new this year and in the process met Knoppix creator, Klaus Knopper, saw the latest in 3D printing, and talked with John "Maddog" Hall about Project Cauã.

Ardour chief developer Paul Davis has released version 3.0 of his digital audio workstation. Ardour 3's most important new feature is the multi-track recorder's comprehensive MIDI support and MIDI sequencing functionality. Ardour supports instrument plugins in Steinberg's VST format, the AudioUnit format of Mac OS X, and the LV2 Linux standard, successor to the LADSPA format. The MIDI workflow is modelled after the audio workflow: notes played on a MIDI device can be recorded as separate tracks and then played back via a software synthesizer. An overview of the MIDI-enabled multi-track recorder's capabilities is available on the project's feature page.

According to a Google+ posting from Google, there were no winners in Google's own Pwnium competition, which followed Pwn2Own at the CanSecWest conference in Canada. Google had offered a prize fund, inspired by the constant pi, of $3.14159 million with $110,000 prizes if the browser or system could be compromised and $150,000 prizes if the compromise could be persisted over a reboot. The target for the attacks was a Series 5 550 Chromebook running the latest stable ChromeOS.

Daylight savings just began, which means it’s the time of year to start looking forward to the spring release of Ubuntu. But could this year’s version, 13.04, be the last one in the biannual release cycle that Canonical has stalwartly maintained for almost a decade? For the moment, that remains uncertain, but the issue, which has produced a stunning amount of debate, could have ramifications well beyond the Ubuntu ecosystem.

When I heard, in a tutorial video, the multi-platform programmer's editor Sublime described as "the cool kids' code editor" (or possibly "the Cool Kid's code editor" - the speaker didn't enunciate his capitals and apostrophes very clearly) I was puzzled. As the goto (or, rather, the call-by-reference) consultant on Agile Harlem Shake in the northwest corner of our floor, surely no such assertion could plausibly be made without first interviewing me? Nothing would have come of this if TextPad, normally as reliable as a tax demand, had not crashed. Twice. Unprovoked. Editing piddly little config files.

Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech. Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.

It seems that the FOSS community sees its ranks expand just about every day, as new fans of free and open source software join the fold. What's much less common is to see former advocates of Linux and FOSS change their minds and depart. That's pretty much what happened last week, when GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza announced that he has abandoned desktop Linux in favor of Apple's Mac platform.

It's no secret that Linux and open-source projects have fights over the direction of a project, but it's unusual for Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, to public fuss with programmers via his blog.

Cloud computing requires good configuration management, see how Puppet and CloudStack play well with each other.