Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit Summary

The Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" release has now ended in Orlando, Florida. Here is a brief summary of some of the interesting news and discussions that took place for this leading Linux desktop distribution.

Kicking off the UDS-P event was Mark Shuttleworth's keynote where he announced that he was pushing Canonical and the Ubuntu development community to develop versions of Ubuntu and the Unity interface for mobile phones, more tablet-like devices, and even TVs. His goal is to see Ubuntu Linux on these new form factors in two years for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release.

Also from that day was lots of ARM talk, including bringing QEMU/KVM to the ARM Cortex A15, which is the next-gen ARM processor that is much faster than the A9 and offers up a whole lot of new capabilities. Monday also included talks about Ubuntu on tablets, improving the Xen support in Ubuntu 12.04, and integrating systemd interfaces into Ubuntu (while not using systemd outright) and the eventual support for PackageKit too.

To help third-party developers, Ubuntu will produce more documentation and a stable API. This stable API is just meant for the key desktop libraries and not for kernel interfaces, which are subject to change on a per-release basis due to the lack of upstream interest in a stable kernel API/ABI.

Not only will KVM (the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Xen see refinements in Ubuntu 12.04, but LXC (Linux Containers) will be better off with this next long-term support release.

The Linux 3.2 kernel will be the default kernel for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. One of the technical changes that I am fond of is Ubuntu finally recommending the 64-bit edition over the 32-bit Ubuntu build.