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London 21st August 2014: VMware, Inc., and Canonical today announced that certified Ubuntu LTS images are available on VMware vCloud® Air™, an enterprise-grade cloud platform offering customers performance, reliability, and security for their cloud infrastructures. The relationship brings optimised and fully supported Ubuntu LTS images to VMware’s customers.

Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system in the cloud and is estimated to represent almost 70 percent of the workloads running in public clouds today. Canonical has worked with VMware to test, optimise and validate Ubuntu images for VMware vCloud Air giving customers a consistent, quality cloud experience across platforms and immediate access to updates.

“Canonical’s enterprise-class Ubuntu LTS is one of the most popular cloud operating systems requested by vCloud Air customers,” says Ajay Patel, vice president of Applications Services, vCloud Air, VMware. “By integrating Ubuntu into our portfolio of pre-configured OS templates, VMware is able to offer our customers another secure and versatile cloud operating system in a quick-to-deploy virtual machine.”

We’re really excited to announce that Canonical has been selected as one of the 2015 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers. The award was given to Canonical in the Digital Networks and Computing category, which recognises organisations involved in computer hardware, software and networks, as well as their applications for social, security, payment or learning purposes.

It is no secret that Ubuntu is by far the most popular cloud guest OS on the world’s major public clouds. Figures range from 55-75% depending on the source and the cloud provider in question, but it’s something we are very proud of and a status we seek to maintain and grow. However, the spirit of Ubuntu has always embraced openness and collaboration with others. That’s why we created OIL , the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab, in which we test thousands of third-party solution combinations against OpenStack to ensure compatibility and high performance, and it’s why the Ubuntu ecosystem is one of the largest and fastest growing in the industry.

As a continuation of this trend, we have been working with Microsoft to develop and certify virtio drivers, virtualised Windows drivers that allow Windows guests to run on KVM hypervisors and subsequently, on OpenStack. This allows enterprises with a large Windows Server footprint to build OpenStack clouds on Ubuntu but keep their guest OS and workloads untouched. The virtio drivers provide optimised performance for a guest running on an Ubuntu OpenStack cloud, and are available for all current Windows Server editions, including Windows 2008R2, Windows 2012, and Windows 2012R2.

The drivers are available to Canonical customers as part of the Ubuntu Advantage support programme. Ubuntu issues a Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel release every 6 months, and Canonical will also be supporting those kernels against the Windows Server releases, so customers will always enjoy updated Windows drivers for their guests. The drivers will run on any Ubuntu Server Long-term Support (LTS) release as well as any OpenStack version supported under that release.

Canonical has gone through the certification process under Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) which included Microsoft signing off the driver as a stable and reliable plug-in, as well as certifying the full platform, which means endorsing that Ubuntu can run Windows guests in a stable way. The end goal is to provide a reliable platform for all of our customers and give them a choice to run Ubuntu or Windows equally well.

Canonical wants to make developers who create applications for platforms other than Ubuntu feel at home. In a recent article posted on his blog, +Didier Roche, Software Engineer at Canonical, writes: "Ubuntu loves developers and we are going to showcase it by making Ubuntu the best available developer platform!".

To achieve this, the Ubuntu Developer Tools Center was created, a project to enable quick and easy setup of common developers needs on Ubuntu. For now, Canonical is focusing on Android developers, but more will follow, like Go developers, web developers, Dart and more.

Ubuntu Developer Tools Center is currently in alpha and right now, it allows installing the latest version of Android Studio along with the latest Android SDK and their dependencies, enable multi-arch on 64bit machines as well as integrate Android Studio with the Unity Launcher.

Ubuntu Developer Tools Center (UDTC) will always target the latest Ubuntu development version along with the latest Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) version. Right now, Ubuntu 14.04 users who want to install UDTC will have to use the official Ubuntu Developer Tools Center PPA (see installation instructions below), but in the future it should be available in the official Ubuntu 14.04 (backports) repositories. As for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, UDTC is already available in the repositories.

After writing earlier this week about a new AMD Catalyst driver paving the way for X Server 1.16 in Ubuntu 14.10, the updated packages have officially landed within the Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" archive.

The updated AMD Catalyst driver has xorg-server 1.16 ABI compatibility, which for weeks was blocking X.Org Server from being updated in Ubuntu to avoid forcing users to run the open-source AMD driver, etc. Now that AMD sent over this updated driver that has yet to be publicly launched on AMD.com, Canonical went ahead and pushed down the X.Org Server 1.16 update and the updated DDX input/video drivers with compatibility for the new server. Those packages are now in the official Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic" package archive for anyone doing daily testing of the distribution.

X.Org Server 1.16 has many new features ranging from XWayland support to a built-in, optimized GLAMOR 2D acceleration implementation. It's great that the code finally landed for Ubuntu 14.10, two months after it was officially released as stable.