Ubuntu Developer Summit 12.10 Recap

The weeklong Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" wrapped up on Friday in Oakland, California. There was a lot of interesting notes shared on Phoronix from the UDS-Q event, so here's a summary of the most prominent happenings last week as the future of Ubuntu Linux was plotted.

- Mark Shuttleworth started the UDS event, as usual. Shortly after that, Chris Kenyon made the very ambitious statement that Canonical expects to ship Ubuntu on 5% of worldwide PCs by next year and other grand plans.

- Calxeda showed off a 192-core Ubuntu ARM Server. This very interesting Calxeda ARM server was shown off during Mark Shuttleworth's keynote. However, they never powered it on. I later heard rumors that the system is not actually functional and that "the solder was still wet" but things should be more interesting in the coming weeks. Calxeda did show off a 48-core ARM setup that was running Ubuntu 12.04, but their only demonstration of that was running a LAMP server with a WordPress blog and some other basic workloads -- work that could be easily achieved on a PandaBoard. It was disappointing, but they did at least highlight Phoronix in the Calxeda keynote. I am also talking to Calxeda now so hopefully when the hardware is ready we will be able to deliver some benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.

- The biggest problem for a Linux PC vendor was shared. This led to some interesting NVIDIA Linux information.

- Ubuntu 12.10 is still working on a sound theme.

- The Linux 3.5 kernel is likely to be in Ubuntu 12.10, but the option is reserved to ship the Linux 3.6 kernel.

- Ways were explored to lock-down third-party Debian packages on Ubuntu Linux.

- EA began pushing some crappy web-based games through the Ubuntu Software Center. The EA keynote at UDS was also boring. The open-source EA web-site shows Linux gamers just how serious EA is about open-source and Linux at the moment...

- Unity 2D is to be dropped from Ubuntu 12.10. Users now will need to use Unity 3D with LLVMpipe if you lack GPU hardware acceleration.