Canonical Chases Deal to Ship Ubuntu Server OS 151
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell to make Ubuntu available pre-installed on servers. 'Canonical, despite obviously supporting such a deal, had little to do with Dell's decision. Dell said it was merited by customer demand. Likewise, the decision of whether Ubuntu Server will ship pre-installed will be determined the same way.'"
Servers...WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with imaging WinXP, you'll need the drivers. You'll have to find the drivers. Somewhere. And build your image with them.
Worst-case-scenario for Linux as a whole (Score:4, Insightful)
I just can't help but worry that Canonical is overextending themselves (even if it is in reaction to Dell asking them to do so), and that the distro will eventually cave once bad PR builds up from a few high-profile failures at the enterprise/corporation level. Those in the FOSS community might not care about bad corporate PR, but it would certainly set Linux back quite a bit adoption-wise to have its golden front-runner made to look extremely foolish.
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, perhaps the PHBs who are used to buying computers with Windows pre-installed will feel more comfortable about buying (or rather, approving the purchase of) a server if the OS is pre-installed.
Why would there be failures? (Score:4, Insightful)
#1. Hardware dies. Only an idiot would blame this on Canonical/Ubuntu. If it's under warranty, Dell should be able to replace it.
#2. Software corruption. This would be Canonical's/Ubuntu's fault. But I've run their stuff for years without any problems. Why would there be problems now?
#3. Driver problem. Well, this is why you have these "partnerships" so the software vendor can work with the hardware vendor to solve these problems BEFORE you purchase their products.
#4. Stupid admin problem. Yeah, like there's anything Canonical or Dell can do to prevent that.
So, the only real potential problem looks like the exact thing that such a partnership would be designed to resolve. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu Server is for novice system admins that just have to have all the newest bells and whistles. I'm in the group as far as my personal projects go. I would not consider installing it at work, though, even an LTS. (We -are- thinking about Gentoo, but that's headed by someone who uses it a lot already. We currently have RedHat.)
I can't count the number of times at work I've said 'Man, if we had Ubuntu server, upgrading that would be SO easy.' But then I stop and think 'Yeah, and what would the frequent updates break?' We've had -planned- updates to critical components go horribly wrong before, and are even using a very old version of 1 library because we had issues with a newer version, and the sysadmin (at the time) was afraid to mess with it any more. When we upgrade next, it'll be tons of fun finding out what works and what doesn't, I'm sure.
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:5, Insightful)
Case in point: the company I work for offers a relatively advanced web solution. The software doesn't actually deal with mission critical data, it is used for projections and on the fly analytic operations, on a user per user basis. So each user has a copy of the data and basically mess with it the way they bloody want until they get an acceptable result, print a report, then go to their primary system (which isn't by us, and is totally independant in every ways, shape and form) and perform mission critical operations THERE.
For our servers, we can toss the app on anything, passwords can be in plain text (well, could if users didn't reuse passwords all over, which isn't the case so I guess they can't!), the machine can be tossed and kicked around, it doesn't really matter if the system's down for a day, or a week, as long as it comes back and it "works".
This is actually an incredibly common scenario, and more and more as a lot of software is moved to simple web apps (because of the Web 2.0 overhype) and other such things, especially since hardware is so cheap (I've seen servers running cache engines made with less than 300 lines of code, including comments, in a farm... hardly mission critical either), so there's IS a pretty high demand for "dumb-friendly" servers that don't even require the sysadmin intervention when they screw up.
In such cases, something like Ubuntu Server probably fits the bill amazingly nicely. If the machine screws up BAD, you call the sysadmin...but the rest of the time, let said professional handle the important stuff, and have the junior manage the non-critical, novice friendly environments. Saves time and money for everyone.
Re:Worst-case-scenario for Linux as a whole (Score:3, Insightful)
The big money is with support for servers, not desktops. And there-in lies the problem. Canonical are just looking for the gold.
It's a shame since Ubuntu is the opposite of most other distros out there, and hence makes poor server and good desktop. Greed may ruin the distro on both server and desktop markets, and with it, all recent hopes of take-up of Linux installs on the desktop.
Re:Why would there be failures? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know what the "Server Support package" includes but it sounds fancy.
Re:Pre-installed OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with imaging WinXP, you'll need the drivers. You'll have to find the drivers. Somewhere. And build your image with them.
This isn't WinXP here. The type of hardware that ends up in server boxes usually has complete support in any recent kernel release.
And, companies like RedHat make sure all the kernel modules for HBA cards are compiled too.