Ubuntu Will Soon Ship On 5% of New PCs 441
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Phoronix: "Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux. Namely, Ubuntu will ship on 5% of worldwide PC sales with a number of 18 million units annually."
The best part... (Score:5, Informative)
The other obvious benefit is no Microsoft tax. Even if Ubuntu gets some money, as opposed to the OS being truly fiscally free, at least that money goes to an entity that has a vested interest in improving Linux.
Content? (Score:5, Informative)
This is the whole article without side-notes, Braced comments and not in the summary:
- Eight to ten million units shipped last year world-wide.
- Canonical will be opening their first Beijing office this year.
- Last year Ubuntu shipped on 7.5 billion dollars worth of hardware.
Re:This Gamemakerlessness is an eyesore! (Score:2, Informative)
I have no clue, though I , and everyone else here, knows, gamemaker sucks ass
Re:This Gamemakerlessness is an eyesore! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I cant wait for the future (Score:2, Informative)
You can, and many of us do, run a variety of UIs on the same machine and load whatever we like.
Try that with Windows and let us know how it works out.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
It's nice to see this happening just before the UEFI change-over as well to help ensure than Microsoft doesn't lock out other OS options,
Why so worried about this? Microsoft's own hardware certification [microsoft.com] process requires this is not the case on x86 systems. Page 116:
MANDATORY: On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:
a) It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK.
b) If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system will be operating in Setup Mode with Secure Boot turned off.
c) The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults.
Re:The best part... (Score:5, Informative)
There are quite a few computer vendors that offer Linux options at purchase... Google around. Here's a list, for example: http://linuxpreloaded.com/ [linuxpreloaded.com]. I'm sure that a few of them ship internationally too. I suppose the main drawback is that the price is still steeper cause of shipping, but that's life....
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Providing the signing key that's used for Windows would completely defeat the purpose of secure boot as anti-malware tool, since any malware could then be signed with it and work out of the box.
Instead, the way it works is that you generate your own key, sign your bootloader with that, and add it to the signature database - this was covered by this item in GP's post:
It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK.
Re:This Gamemakerlessness is an eyesore! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
What about ARM systems?
Works great actually (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to mess with your UI on Windows, there's all kinds of stuff to do it. MS has some limited tools and customizations but they really aren't in to that thing. The biggest purveyor of such things is probably Stardock. They have a massive set of tools to customize the looks of Windows in all kinds of ways, including very radical changes. They've been doing it for years and so are quite good at it. You can buy a whole suit of stuff or get produces one by one to customize what you like.
Also you can simple replace explorer as the shell. Windows doesn't mandate its use, it is just what is included, what is default. Another popular one is BB4Win, which is a windows manager inspired by Blackbox (different codebase though). It sees use on systems where people want somethign different, but also sometimes on Windows PE boot systems to keep memory usage down since it is less heavy hitting than explorer.
So in the future, perhaps less snark if you've not actually tried what you speak of. That Windows doesn't ship with 5 window managers, 20 media players, and so on does not mean that it only supports one thing. It is quite extensible, it just have a very well defined and enriched standard set of tools.
Linux is nothing but a kernel, all the rest is up to the person who decides to package it up, as such there are no mandated standards, just ad hoc ones and often many of them. It is a minimal OS definition, the rest is up for grabs.
Windows is an enriched OS definition. It includes a whole lot of stuff with it. It does not exclude you from adding your own, it just mandates that it comes with a bunch of things. Explorer, IE, WDM, DirectX, RDP, etc, etc are all part of the definition that is "Windows". It comes with all of it, however it is not less modular for it. You can add BB4Win, Firefox, ASIO, OpenGL, VNC and so on and they will all work fine, you can use them in addition to or in place of their various included components.
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Informative)
If you had issues like these then the hardware clearly wasn't exactly the same, and this is a common problem...
Large scale box shifters like dell will often change the hardware in a box without changing the model number, wether its wifi chipset, motherboard revision, hard drive model etc... It's quite common to see supposedly "identical" machines with different guts.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
They lock it on ARM for the same reason Google does it with ChromeOS, because if you can just bypass the boot security on a mobile device ALL security is as easy to bypass as "Hey want a free copy of "Plants VS Zombie" well just run this!" which then installs itself into the boot and ur pwned.
What's interesting about the Microsoft associates on this site is how ignorant they are about computing, even their own operating systems.
There's this principle of having different execution contexts which is implemented (among other places) in the NT kernel at the heart of Windows operating systems. This is just as applicable in a mobile environment under ARM as anywhere else. You can mark one context as "administrator" which has access to the boot loader and another context as "user" which doesn't. This means that even if the user runs the "Plants VS Zombie" trojan it will not be able to take over the system, just the single user account. You can then provide a simple "restore to defaults" function which restores the user's account or even you can provide a proper anti-virus solution which runs in the administrator context but cleans up the user's context. This allows us to set up concept known as "defence in depth" [microsoft.com] where there is more than one layer of security protecting your system and you can even opt out of certain security features that aren't suitable for your application without compromising your overall security.
The great thing about using multiple execution contexts is this is that it can even be layered over a secure boot mechanism which is part of why Google ChromeOS is able to have a secure boot mechanism and still allow you to take total control of your system safely. Some systems like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora even provide multiple security contexts within one user context through advanced mechanisms like SELinux. For normal users this works out of the box, but if you want to achieve special effects there can be some considerable time investment. I'd advise you to install a new version of Fedora and spend the next ten years or so building custom secure execution environments so that you can keep yourself entertained for life.
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Informative)
Same here, except it's an i5 box I built. The RALink WiFi card wasn't recognized in Win7, but luckily I had saved the driver/installer on another partition. Ubuntu had no problems recognizing it.
Win XP on a Thinkpad T43p had no sound. I had to find drivers for it. Ubuntu has no problem with sound on the laptop.
Dell Mini has had no driver problems running Ubuntu (it came with a Dell version that I wiped and loaded with regular Ubuntu) and another newer Thinkpad has no problems with drivers in Win7 and Ubuntu (running the latest version).
I had to go into "additional drivers" on my MILs Dell (few years old) to enable wireless. So not automatic, but certainly easily available (ethernet worked, so I was able to download that way).
All annecodotal, I know, but there aren't always problems and for me, Ubuntu just works better.