Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") is dead on arrival (DOA), as far as I'm concerned. I first tested it as a "LiveCD" on a 2.4 GHz Intel Celeron laptop computer with 512 MB RAM (470 MB available to system) and internal 30 GB PATA hard drive. Although the interface looked nice, the Firefox 3.0.8 browser performed extremely slowly. Loading Google (http://www.google.com) on this machine with Ubuntu 8.10 ("Intrepid Ibex") takes less than one second; with 9.04 it takes over a minute. Loading Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com) takes less than eight seconds with 8.10; with 9.04 I gave up when it failed to complete loading in ten minutes. (Yes, that's right -- ten MINUTES!!) Thinking it was a LiveCD memory swap phenomenon, the next day I actually installed it on the hard drive. Performance from the hard drive was just as poor. I could see that Firefox was rendering the page content very quickly once each file arrived, but Ubuntu was having an extremely difficult time communicating over the network. Acquiring a wireless network connection with 8.10 usually takes 10-30 seconds, but with 9.04 it takes as much as five minutes, with one or two timeouts and manual retries. The computer and base station were in the same locations for both tests, with no nearby electromagnetic interference to affect the outcome.
Naturally, Jaunty Jackalope only survived on my machine about three hours, just long enough to install it and perform some basic tests, before reverting to Intrepid Ibex. Had it not been for both of my Ubuntu machines mysteriously having their Samba installations trashed almost simultaneously late last week, unable to communicate with each other or any Windows machines, I wouldn't even have bothered with 9.04. (From the many posts on the Ubuntu forums, I gather that poor Samba networking reliability since Ubuntu 7.10 is a widely known, poorly understood problem among Ubuntu users, but that's an issue for discussion elsewhere.)
How could this happen? There is nothing unusual about the machine on which the test was run -- a Fry's Electronics "Great Quality" RX-7335 -- as the machine has performed perfectly well with Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP in the past. It appears to be the result of insufficient testing and an accelerated release schedule. I'd rather see Canonical issue a major release once a year and shift more resources into testing and fixing some of the serious bugs and deficiencies in the operating system. Overall, Jaunty Jackalope is a disappointment, after the discussions I'd read on 'blog sites two months ago of how its power management was greatly improved. I'd like to use some version of Linux to run an ultra-low-power home RAID file server with wake-on-LAN capabilities in a mixed Linux/Windows environment, but Ubuntu 9.04 is clearly not it, since its network functions are seriously broken.
Canonical's Ubuntu reaches for the cloud
Summary
Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Server Edition is available on Amazon EC2, while Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is an EC2-compatible system that can create a cloud on a company's own network.
Topics
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, on Thursday announced two major components of its cloud-computing strategy.
With the launch of version 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, Ubuntu Server Edition is available on Amazon EC2, while Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is an EC2-compatible system that can create a cloud on a company's own network.
"We can see the benefits of the cloud, and the risks," Simon Wardley, software services manager for Canonical, told ZDNet UK. "The risks are transitional — do I trust the vendor? Are there second-sourcing options? What's the learning curve? So with Ubuntu, users can build their private infrastructures and go public when they're ready."
See also: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud system is based on Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 and Eucalyptus, a system with an EC2-compatible API, elastic block storage (EBS) equivalent and an S3 compatible storage manager. With it, the company said, users can build their own private clouds entirely from open-source components.
"We want to be sure our customers can navigate safely into the cloud", Wardley said, "and we see this working according to three rules. Rule one is to build on their own infrastructure. Rule two is moving between their infrastructure and an external provider. Rule three is switching between providers".
Ubuntu's emphasis is on standards, said Wardley, and the best candidate for an open cloud standard to date was Amazon's EC2 "by a mile. There's an open-source implementation in Eucalyptus. The standard has to be open, or the entire market becomes dependent on one vendor's direction, and users are asking for second sourcing options".
Although Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is compatible with Amazon's EC2, deployments onto a private cloud will not yet move seamlessly onto Amazon's own public cloud. "This is a stepping stone, a starting point towards portability," Wardley said. "There's a lot of work, and this is a journey."
Wardley added that in the near future, Canonical will add policies and intracloud portability to Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
"If you have a large cloud and usage is low, you can consolidate your running virtual machines onto a few physical machines, and turn the rest off," said Wardley. "We have a perfectly functional system now, but expect a lot more in Karmic Koala, version 9.10."
In the longer term, Wardley said, Canonical wanted to see a marketplace evolve among cloud providers. "We would love to see Amazon to see take EC2 towards standardization. It's in the interests of entire industry. There are too many variants, EC2 is the de facto standardization, and it's essential that we have a standard."
This article was originally posted on ZDNet UK.
Talkback Most Recent of 2 Talkback(s)
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Tony R.28th Apr 2009 -
RE: Canonical's Ubuntu reaches for the cloud
Upgraded my personal laptop with Jaunty this morning and the work computers this evening. 27 seconds boot-up time!!! 27 seconds. Tell you what, if you look at the advances over the last two years that ubuntu have made it's incredible. Those open-source boyos are welcome to buy cheaper books offa me any time. When I first used Dapper it gave me a feeling of accomplishment because it was obvious who the underdog was, with Jaunty I have dispelled the notion of Win 7 as a linux killer.
Sorry dude that your upgrade wan't so successful. My firefox is more sharpish than ever, I even activated all the add-ons for the first time & it was still snappy. Quicker app time opening. Absolutely thrilled by ubuntu. This is a full-scale OS which gets my work done and we all think it's fairly stylish. Quicker than OSX at the moment too which, mind you I'm not happy about because my mac wasn't cheap, makes you wonder where Ubuntu goes next. Go Canonical!
jonnyrun28th Apr 2009
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