Desktops and servers
In terms of immediate impact, the release of the desktop and server platforms affect more people than the phone release. But the desktop won’t look dramatically different from 13.04.
“The desktop is seeing a little bit less feature development because most of the engineering has been focused on the phone,” Bacon said.
New versions of LibreOffice, RhythmBox, and Firefox are included in 13.10, naturally.
One desktop feature that some will like and some will hate is called Smart Scopes, which greatly expands Internet search results in the Unity Dash. This effort began when Canonical added Amazon to the Dash. Smart Scopes brings results from many more sites such as Wikipedia, reddit, Foursquare, eBay, the Ubuntu One music store, and Grooveshark, Bacon said. Smart Scopes can be disabled if you prefer the Dash to search only your desktop instead of the whole Internet.
We have a full review of the desktop ready to roll tomorrow, so stay tuned.
Ubuntu Server 13.10, also available tomorrow, brings improvements targeted at businesses building private clouds and virtualization deployments. These include the latest version of the OpenStack cloud building software and upgrades to the Juju management software, which helps IT shops deploy applications to various cloud services.
“In 13.10, Juju can instantly deploy an entire software environment or service as a ‘bundle’ directly from the easy-to-use Juju GUI, improving on the previous deployment of individual components,” Canonical said in a press release. “This reduces complexity and enables administrators to share entire complex workloads consisting of many related parts.”
Juju can also manage LXC, or Linux Containers, a lightweight virtualization technology that lets users run multiple isolated Linux systems on a single physical or virtual machine.
“The Ubuntu LXC update in 13.10 provides blindingly fast (less than one second) and efficient cloning of containers for faster scaling of containerized services,” Canonical said.
Ubuntu Server and Openstack are becoming an increasingly large part of Canonical’s revenue. Although Canonical is not about to topple Linux server king Red Hat, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth told Ars recently that the company’s server and Openstack business is profitable.
That stands in contrast to Canonical’s overall business, which still loses money. Shuttleworth hopes his grand vision of a platform that extends from mobile phones to desktops, servers, and the cloud will ultimately push Canonical over the top.