Oct 212014
 

Linux distribution Ubuntu should soon be wrapping up work on Ubuntu Touch, its first iteration for smartphones.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical (the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu), wrote in a blog post Monday, October 20, 2014:

Our ventrous quest to put GNU as you love it on phones is bearing fruit, with final touches to the first image in a new era of convergence in computing. From tiny devices to personal computers of all shapes and sizes to the ventose vistas of cloud computing, our goal is to make a platform that is useful, versal and widely used.

Ubuntu has partnered with mobile device manufacturers bq of Spain and Meizu of China to bring Ubuntu Touch based smartphones to consumers globally.

Ubuntu Touch should be available eventually for both low-end and high-end smartphones. The goal for the high-end version is to provide a desktop Ubuntu experience when users connect it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Applications designed for Ubuntu Desktop should also run on Ubuntu Touch since the core technologies underpinning the two platforms are the same.

India and other parts of Asia, and Europe, regions where Ubuntu has a strong presence, are expected to be major target markets for Ubuntu Touch.

Barring last-minute showstoppers, Ubuntu Touch devices should be available by the end of 2014.

Besides being the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, Canonical provides support services for Ubuntu deployments in the enterprise.

Utopic Unicorn Due

Meanwhile, Ubuntu’s next release for the desktop code-named Utopic Unicorn (Ubuntu 14.10) is in the final phase of development with code contributors and bug fixers working frantically to wring out the last bugs from the software and enable hardware enablement fixes.

The Linux Kernel has been updated to 3.16 in Ubuntu 14.10 in addition to other modest improvements.

Expect to see Utopic Unicorn on October 23, 2014.

In the blog post, Shuttleworth wrote that the next release of Ubuntu has been code-named Vivid Vervet.

Ubuntu users should expect to see Vivid Vervet (Ubuntu 15.04) in April 2015.

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