Ubuntu: Power Consumption, KVM, Mozilla, Etc

Here's some of the notes from Wednesday at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando for discussing the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" plans.

Ubuntu One As Your User Account: Canonical is planning to make it possible to sign into an Ubuntu installation using the Ubuntu One cloud credentials. In that if you sign into an Ubuntu system -- whether it's a desktop or mobile device -- you can have immediate access to all of your data stored in Ubuntu's cloud associated with your single sign-on account.

Network access would be required, obviously. The plan would be writing a PAM module to authenticate against Ubuntu One, users wouldn't need to create a local account, easily supports multiple devices, would streamline migrations, and provide other benefits. One of the action items expressed is to even have sign-in support with Facebook. More details can be found on this notes page.

Ubuntu-Qt Integration: See the notes page.

Mozilla In Ubuntu: The Thunderbird and Firefox packages in the Ubuntu repositories will more closely follow the quick release cycles of these Mozilla software projects. Full details here.

Low-Latency Ubuntu Kernel: There's going to be an unofficial Ubuntu -lowlatency kernel available from the Ubuntu Precise repository. This low-latency kernel will be unofficial and maintained by the Ubuntu Studio team. The low-latency work is optimizations in the Linux kernel to reduce latency to make it more ideal for audio work (among other workloads) than the generic Linux kernel. More information here.

KVM Virtualization In Ubuntu 12.04: The goal is to include QEMU 1.0 and build with SPICE support for QEMU/KVM. However, not too many plan for KVM in Ubuntu Precise are being brewed since the developers want to play it safe during this LTS cycle. More details with the notes here.

A Calendar For Ubuntu: Since GNOME's Evolution was replaced by Mozilla Thunderbird (in Ubuntu 11.04), there hasn't been any default calendar application in Ubuntu. There's a Lightning calendar plug-in that was talked about to possibly bundle with Ubuntu's Thunderbird. An alternative is to provide a standalone calendar application, but there isn't one developed for GNOME3 (nor is there one expected for GNOME 3.4). One possible option is using the Maya calendar application from the Elementary project. Details here.

GNOME For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will mostly be sticking with the GNOME 3.2 packages and applications (not the GNOME 3.4 packages under development for release in March). However, there will be GTK+ 3.4 and other select GNOME 3.4 components such as GNOME Games, Gedit, Gcalctool, and other "easy" applications like Evince and Yelp (possibly). GNOME packages not found on the main Ubuntu CD might also be upgraded to version 3.4. But Nautilus will stay at version 3.2 due to the UDisk rewrite, Evolution 3.4 requiring Clutter, and Totem will also stay at version 3.0 since Canonical doesn't want to include Clutter for the LTS release. GConf/GTK2 will likely stay on the Ubuntu Precise CD.

Text-Free Boot: The goal with Ubuntu 12.04 is to have a flicker-free boot process, to not show the console during suspend/resume, and overall a text-free boot process for Ubuntu.

Power Consumption: Nothing too relevant to the wide Ubuntu-using community was said. Barely anything about ASPM (only mentioned in passing a few times), nothing about significant power improvements (like investing engineering efforts to get open-source GPU drivers to implement proper power-savings support), and mostly talk about fine-tuned power improvements (e.g. disabling JavaScript in the browser, WiFi kill switch handling, etc to generally save one Watt or two or less.) Canonical is finally getting some power meters to measure and test various tweaks in user-space and kernel-space.

Other: Thunderbird improvements, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release planning, Upstart improvements, further AppArmor work, and the state of OpenJDK for ARM, the future of Ubuntu papercuts. Coming up next is LightDM improvements and the default application discussion.

There's also my notes from the Ubuntu Developer Summit on Tuesday and Monday.