50 Things You Need to Know About Ubuntu (40-31)

Here’s part two of The VAR Guy’s five-part countdown, highlighting 50 trends and takeaways from the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Oregon. Items 40-31, with more to follow soon…

50-41. In Case You Missed It: Here’s that part of the list.

40. Ubuntu Training and Certification: Canonical is ramping up a world wide training and certification initiative. Watch for major developments in the U.S. by the end of this year. Some training components are already in place. Here’s an overview.

39. Teachers Need to Open Their Minds: Multiple presenters at the conference mentioned that university students are eagerly adopting Ubuntu. But on the other hand, they said, professors sometimes resist Ubuntu because they can’t open their minds beyond Windows and Office.

38. HP Ubuntu PCs – Coming Soon?: Bdale Garbee, Linux CTO at Hewlett-Packard, is scheduled to give a keynote today (July 23) at 9:40 a.m. pacific. We’ll see if he discloses if — or when — Hewlett-Packard plans to offer Ubuntu pre-installed on selected PCs.

37. Apple Isn’t the Enemy: Bringing a Windows-only laptop to the conference would have been political suicide for The VAR Guy. But he fit right in with his MacBook Pro. It seems a large segment of the Ubuntu community are using MacBooks to run Mac OS X and Ubuntu either in a dual-boot mode or in some type of virtualized environment.

36. Operating Systems are Irrelevant: At first, that sounds like blasphemy. But presenter James Ward from Adobe Systems makes a compelling point: The key to making desktop Linux a success is making the operating system irrelevant. Ward believes three technologies — OpenOffice, FireFox and the Adobe Flash Player (surprise, surprise) — can fulfill his vision.

35. Ubuntu Is Coming to Your Living Room: You know about Apple TV and Tivo. But have you heard about OpenMedia Ltd.? The New Zealand-based company is designing Ubuntu-based music and movie appliances … though not for the U.S. market. Steve Ellis, technical director at OpenMedia, thinks he’d have too much trouble navigating U.S. patent laws. Several other stealth U.S. companies at the event, however, are evaluating Ubuntu-based appliance strategies.

34. Ubuntu Is for Database Servers: The VAR Guy spotted Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, at a conference reception on Sunday evening. Mickos is scheduled to deliver a keynote at 9:20 a.m. today (July 23). His company, as you likely know, develops the fastest-growing open source database platform. Some pundits expect MySQL to launch an initial public offering late this year or in early 2008.

33. Open Source Email Meets Ubuntu: Zimbra, the fast-growing provider of open source email, also earned some attention at the event. Mingzhe (“J.J.”) Zhuang, a software architect from Zimbra, outlined the company’s strategy to attendees.

32. In Eben We Trust: Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center, won strong applause from attendees for protecting and advancing free and open source software.

31. More Open Source Magic to Come: Software industry pioneer Mitch Kapor compared open source to the Harry Potter book series, stating that the open source movement is probably in book 3 or book 4 of a seven-part series.

30-21. The next chapter in our countdown.