Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

MAAS is intended to complement Juju, Canonical's service orchestration framework. Juju works a little bit like a package management system: administrators use Juju recipes (which are called Charms) to automatically deploy and configure various server software stacks. Juju integrates with MAAS, making it possible to centrally deploy software to the nodes in a MAAS cluster.

Using MAAS and Juju together can significantly reduce the difficulty of bringing up an Ubuntu-based private cloud. A system administrator can use MAAS to provision nodes and then use Juju to populate those nodes with complete software configurations for things like OpenStack or Hadoop.

Canonical is best known for its desktop Linux product, but the company has worked hard to convince potential adopters that Ubuntu is also a credible choice for servers. The availability of updates at no cost has helped to drive Ubuntu server growth over the past few years, but it still faces an uphill battle competing with Red Hat's highly successful Linux distribution. Canonical's strong focus on the cloud is one way that the company is working to differentiate Ubuntu as a Linux server platform.

For more details about MAAS, you can refer to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about the new project. The source code is available from Canonical's Launchpad project hosting service. MAAS is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04, an upcoming long-term support release that will arrive at the end of the month.





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A decade ago, Linux developer Red Hat faced a decision that would make or break the company: whether to stop producing the very product that gave Red Hat its name. The company was built on Red Hat Linux, but when Paul Cormier—now the head of Red Hat's technologies and products group—joined the company as vice president of engineering in 2001, he knew Red Hat's devotion to open source alone couldn't create a business model capable of standing up to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world. He pushed for drastic action.

To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.







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FXI is preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

It has a USB plug on one side, which is used to power the system, and an HDMI plug on the other side, which allows it to be plugged into a display. It also has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth radios for connectivity and supporting input devices. The system can boot standalone and operate as a complete computer when plugged into a display. It's also possible to plug the Cotton Candy into a conventional computer and boot from it like you would from a regular USB mass storage device.

FXI announced today that the Cotton Candy is available for preorder. The standard retail price is $199 plus tax and shipping. The product is expected to ship in March. The small form factor and relatively high specs make the product seem like a compelling choice for enthusiasts who are looking for an ultra-compact Linux system.





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Experimental support for WebRTC has landed in the Chrome developer channel. The feature is available for testing when users launch the browser with the --enable-media-stream flag. We did some hands-on testing and used some of the new JavaScript APIs to make an HTML5 photo booth.

WebRTC is a proposed set of Web standards for real-time communication. It is intended to eventually enable native standards-based audio and video conferencing in Web applications. It is based on technology that Google obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions and subsequently released under a permissive open source software license.






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On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code. The 2.7 release marks a major milestone for LLVM, as it's the first time that its C language compiler, Clang, has sufficient C++ support to self-host, meaning that it can compile a functional version of itself.

Although the C++ support is considered alpha-quality, LLVM considers Clang's C and Objective-C compiling to be ready for production use. The relatively high quality of Objective-C shouldn't be surprising, as Apple was one of the early commercial backers of the project. The influence of Apple may also be felt in the progress made in supporting ARM processors, which has been given a beta designation. New in this version are support for both the Linux and Darwin ARM ABIs, as well as improved code generation for the ARM vector instruction set, NEON.

But Apple isn't the only game in town. LLVM has been used by Google, for its Unladen Swallow Python project, and Adobe, which adopted it for its ill-fated attempt to get Flash applications running on the iPhone/Pad platform. With 2.7, Linux and Darwin support arrive in the same release, and the Objective-C compilation can now target non-Apple platforms thanks to use of the GNUstep runtime. There's also vastly improved support for VMKit, which allows static and JIT compilation that supports both Java and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure. 2.7 brings a new garbage collection architecture with significantly improved performance.

There are some other interesting tidbits scattered throughout the release notes. Significant progress has been made in developing a plugin that will replace GCC's standard optimizers and code generators with those derived from LLVM. There's also initial support for a soft-processor that operates on field-programmable gate arrays. 
The growing number of projects that rely on LLVM seems to indicate that the project is attracting much wider interest than it was just a few years back.




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Twitter is preparing to launch several impressive new features, including a new streaming API that will give desktop client applications real-time access to the user's message timeline. The new streaming API was announced last week at Twitter's Chirp conference, where it was made available to conference attendees on-site for some preliminary experimentation. Twitter opened it up to the broader third-party developer community on Monday so that programmers can begin testing it to offer informed feedback.

This tutorial will show you how to consume and process data from Twitter's new streaming API. The code examples, which are written in the Python programming language, demonstrate how to establish a long-lived HTTP connection with PyCurl, buffer the incoming data, and process it to perform the basic message display functions of a Twitter client application. We will also take a close look at how the new streaming API differs from the existing polling-based REST API.





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The question of how to print from wireless devices has been thrust once again into the limelight recently thanks to the printing-anemic iPad. Longtime notebook and mobile device users are quite familiar with the printing conundrum—cables, drivers and all.

Google has announced that it's looking to address this problem in the form of Cloud Print. Part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Cloud Print aims to allow any type of application to print to any printer. This includes Web, desktop, and mobile apps from any kind of device—potentially, this could be used on a BlackBerry, Windows machines, Macs, or even the iPad. (That is in addition to Google's own offerings: "Google Chrome OS will use Google Cloud Print for all printing. There is no print stack and there are no printer drivers on Google Chrome OS!" says the company.)





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