Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Officially Relased And it's Available For Download

This new edition comes with the new 'snap' package format and LXD 2.0 pure-container hypervisor. While desktop users might like these, the main audience for these features is the enterprise.

As Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, said in a statement "The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation. We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free-software platform."

To be more precise, Dustin Kirkland who leads platform strategy at Canonical, explained, "The addition of 'snaps' for faster and simpler updates, and the LXD container hypervisor for ultra-fast and ultra-dense cloud computing, demonstrate a commitment to customer needs that sets Ubuntu apart as the platform for innovation and scale."

While LXD has been available for almost two years in production as a supplement to Docker container technology, Snap is new to the desktop and server.

Borrowing from container concepts, snaps enable developers to deliver much newer versions of apps to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS enabling users to stay on a stable base for longer while enjoying newer applications. They do this by containing all a program's dependencies. This has several advantages over traditional deb or rpm based dependency handling. The single biggest is that a developer can always be assured that there are no regressions triggered by changes to the system underneath their app.
According to Olli Ries, Canonical's director of client computing software engineering, "snap packages enable developers to bring much newer versions of apps to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. ... The complexities of packaging and providing updates have prevented us from delivering them in the past."
Ries continued, "The security mechanisms in snap packages allow us to open up the platform for much faster iteration across all of our flavours as snap applications are isolated from the rest of the system. Users can install a snap without having to worry whether it will have an impact on their other apps or their system. Similarly, developers have a much better handle on the update cycle as they can decide to bundle specific versions of a library with their app. Transactional updates make deployments of snap packages more robust and reliable."

To create snap packages, developers can use Snapcraft. This open-source tool makes it easy for developers to package their apps and dependencies. It also gives programmers an environment to write and test their applications directly on their desktop, rather than being forced to use a virtual machine.

This doesn't mean Canonical is giving up on its traditional deb packages. These two packaging formats can live quite comfortably with each other. There is, however, a major exception. Commercial applications will be migrated from debs to snaps by Autumn 2016. Canonical promises to work with the developer community to support that transition with tools, training and documentation.

This new Ubuntu also comes with one controversial feature. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) disapproves of the use of the ZFS file system dues to its licensing, but Canonical has included ZFS. ZFS is a combination of a volume manager and file-system which enables efficient snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic file-system repair, and data compression. It's often used in cloud and servers.

This isn't the only new storage mechanism in Ubuntu. This version also introduces support for CephFS. This is a popular distributed file system that's often used for Big Data and cluster computing enterprise storage.

With this release Ubuntu continues to expand beyond its PC roots. Ubuntu 16.04 is also available on IBM mainframes. Ross A. Mauri, IBM z Systems and LinuxONE general manager, said "With the release of Ubuntu 16.04, IBM will be able to offer our LinuxONE, z Systems and Power Systems clients a simple, affordable high-performance Linux distribution that will better equip them to take advantage of hybrid cloud."

And, shocking as it still is to some, Microsoft continues to support Ubuntu. "With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, customers can take advantage of the powerful combination of Canonical's latest release of Ubuntu with Microsoft Azure," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise division in a statement.

Ubuntu 16.04 is also a Long Term Support (LTS) release. That means it will be supported and maintained by Canonical for five years, making it suitable for long-term, large-scale deployments.



Source: Zdnet

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Microsoft is Bringing Ubuntu to Windows

Microsoft built a Linux subsystem for Windows for Project Astoria, its system for running Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile.

But in February the company confirmed that Astoria was dead, as it rather undermined the Universal Windows Platform concept. At the time, we speculated that portions of Astoria might live on, as portions of it had mysteriously started showing up in Windows Insider Previews. And today, that has come to pass, with Microsoft saying that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will include the ability to run the popular bash shell from Unix, along with the rest of a typical Unix command-line environment.

We're still trying to get the inside story on what Microsoft has done here, but what we've known for several months now is that the company has developed some Windows kernel components (lxcore.sys, lxss.sys, presumably standing for "Linux core" and "Linux subsystem," respectively) that support the major Linux kernel APIs. These components are not GPLed and do not appear to contain Linux code themselves; instead, they implement the Linux kernel API using the native Windows NT API that the Windows kernel provides. Microsoft is calling this the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL).

A kernel API is one thing, but to be useful you need user mode applications. For Astoria, this would have been a version of the Android Open Source Project, Google's mostly BSD-licensed code that provides a Java-like runtime and various applications and system services. For WSL, however, Microsoft is turning to Canonical, creators of Ubuntu, for help. Canonical has provided a system image containing the Ubuntu versions of the various command-line tools that are typically found in a Linux distribution.

Update will also enable UWP apps on Xbox One, and any Xbox to be a dev kit.

Our understanding is that these are not recompiled or ported versions of the programs (as are used in tools aiming to provide a Unix-like environment on Windows such as Cygwin) but instead unmodified programs. Microsoft is describing this in terms of providing a Linux-like command-line environment at the moment, but from what we can gather, there's little fundamental restriction to this, potentially opening the door to running a wide range of Linux programs natively on Windows.

This is far from the first time that Windows has been able to masquerade as a Unix-like operating system. From its inception, Windows NT included something called the POSIX subsystem, offering an environment minimally supporting the standardized version of the Unix APIs. A third-party offering called Interix greatly extended this with a wide range of common Unix command-line tools. Microsoft bought Interix, rebranding it first as Services For Unix (SFU) and then Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA). In one way or another, this Unix-like mode was supported up until Windows 8; Windows 8.1 removed it.

Whatever their names, these various subsystems suffered primarily from appearing to software as yet another Unix variant. They contained subtle differences from the POSIX support found in both FreeBSD and Linux, and they didn't provide the various non-standard extensions found in those kernels. This meant that porting applications to compile and run correctly was challenging.



Source: Arstechnica

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