Today we kick off the week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit, focused on the upcoming 12.04 release, “Precise Pangolin”, shaping the plans for the next 6 months, and breaking the goals into a manageable series of work items. With more than 20 rooms running simultaneous sessions, it’s a challenge to decide what to participate in, whether you’re here in Orlando or following remotely. As we dive in, it’s useful to take a step back and set the sea of sessions into the overall architecture and vision for Ubuntu, to trace the structure of threads running through the pattern.

The Ubuntu project is a tightly integrated collaboration between a community and a company, both focused on making free software approachable and easily available to millions of users. From the first inception of Ubuntu, I’ve always considered this collaboration to be its greatest strength. It’s a beautiful marriage of passionate dedication to software freedom and gravitas in the industry to help build visibility, partnerships, and self-sustaining growth. But, like all marriages, keeping that relationship healthy is an ongoing process, something you do a little bit every day. A few sessions to look out for here are renewing our commitment to encourage each other by showing appreciation for the hard work of all contributors [Monday][*] (including developers [Friday]), the standard Debian health check [Monday], embracing the cultural differences between designers and developers [Tuesday] while building up community participation in user experience and design [Wednesday], a more structured approach to mentoring developers [Wednesday & Friday], and how to welcome a new generation of developers who focus on application development [Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday].

12.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, which means that both the server and desktop releases will be supported with maintenance and security updates for 5 years, instead of the usual 18 months. Ubuntu anticipates that more conservative users will upgrade from one LTS to the next instead of following the “latest and greatest” every 6 months. Because of longer support and conservative upgrades, LTS releases always focus more on quality, polish, and solidifying the user experience, than on introducing new features. A significant set of sessions build on this theme, including tracking high-priority bugs so they get resolved [Wednesday], improving the ISO testing tracker [Friday], process for toolchain stabilization [Tuesday], automated testing of package dependencies [Wednesday], automated regression testing [Thursday], tools for tracking archive problems like FTBFS, NBS, etc, so they can be rapidly fixed [Tuesday], accessibility polish [Thursday], printer setup tool refinements to contribute upstream to GNOME [Thursday], plans for the Lucid->Precise LTS upgrade [Monday], ongoing maintenance in desktop boot speed [Thursday], and automated testing of complex server deployments [Friday]. The world is moving from personal computing on a single dedicated device to “multi-screen” computing across a collection of devices: not just a desktop for home or work, with a laptop or netbook for portability, but handheld devices like phones, tablets, media players, and ebook readers are part of our everyday life. Other dedicated-purpose pieces of technology, like televisions and cars, are getting smarter and smarter, growing into fully-fledged computing devices. The nirvana of this new world is an integrated computing experience where all our devices work together, share data and content where it’s relevant, share interaction models to ease the transition from one device to the next, and also keep appropriate distinctions for different form-factors and different contexts of use. The Linux kernel is an ideal core for this kind of integrated experience, supporting radical diversity in hardware architectures, and scaling smoothly all the way from resource-constrained phones to mega-muscle servers. Ubuntu has had a focus on consumer users from the very start, so it will come as no surprise that the Ubuntu project (both the Ubuntu community and Canonical as a participating company) have a strong interest in this space. Ubuntu Mobile started as early as 2007 (also “UME” or “Ubuntu MID”), and Kubuntu Mobile in 2010. Mark Shuttleworth mentioned in his opening keynote this morning that Canonical plans to invest in the multi-screen experience over the next few years. If you’re interested in this topic, some areas you might want to participate in are: ARM architecture support [Tuesday], ARM hardfloat [Friday], and ARM cross-compilation [Friday] (many small form-factor devices these days are ARM-based), application sandboxing [Wednesday], what’s ahead for the Software Center [Friday], an interactive session on design and user experience in free software applications [Monday], power consumption (relevant for battery life) [Wednesday], printing from the personal cloud [Thursday], the Qt embedded showcase [Tuesday], and potential for a Wayland tech preview [Tuesday]. Also keep an eye out for touch support, virtual keyboards, suspend/resume, and web apps, which don’t have dedicated sessions (yet), but will certainly be weaving through conversations this week.

On the server side, general trends are moving from a traditional view of system administration as “systems integration” to a DevOps view of “service orchestration”. This may sound like a game of buzz-word bingo, but it’s far, far more. What we’re looking at is a fundamental shift from managing increasingly complex deployments by throwing in more humans as slogging foot soldiers, to letting machines do the slogging so humans can focus on the parts of administration that require intelligence, deep understanding, and creative thinking. This industrial revolution is still at an infant stage, converting individual manually operated looms (servers) over to aggregated sets of looms all doing the same thing (configuration management) and automated operation and oversight of whole factories of diverse interacting pieces such as spinners, looms, cutting, and sewing  (service orchestration). If this is your area of focus, it’s worth following the entire Server and Cloud track, but make sure not to miss sessions on Juju [multiple TuesdayWednesday & Thursday], Orchestra [Thursday], OpenStack [Monday & Friday], LXC [Thursday], libvert [Wednesday], cloud power management [Wednesday], and power-consumption testing for ARM [Thursday].

We’ve got an exciting week ahead, enjoy!

[*] UDS is a fast-paced and dynamic “unconference”, so the days, times, and rooms are subject to change. I’ve provided links to the blueprints for details and links to the day where the session is currently scheduled to help find each session in the schedule.