Canonical's Ubuntu Linux variant is popular out there on the public clouds of the world, but there is a serious mismatch between how support contracts are sold for bare-metal servers used inside corporate data centers and how virtual servers are deployed and used out there on the cloud. And Canonical wants to fix that and make a …

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Thursday 28th July 2011 19:03 GMT Steve Davies 3

Do they really expect Businesses to use this?

Well, knock me over with a feather.

I hope that it is not 11.04 they are offering. We trialled it in a cloud POC. It was so bad we all fell around laughing. Our trial came out with SLES & RHEL/CentOS top, Mandriva 2nd, 3rd Debian and last of the 5 Ubuntu.

Fail for obvious reasons.

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1. Friday 29th July 2011 09:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  What were the problems?
  
  What kind of problems did you guys yet?
  
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  1. Friday 29th July 2011 11:14 GMT bill 36
    
    problems you ask?
    
    Let me first of all say that i am not a business user of Ubuntu and i would really like to be a fan of Ubuntu but below is my experimental experience of Maverick and Natty Narwahl.
    
    I should also say that i have built both releases on the same old Siemens Amilo laptop which runs a Pentium 4 chip clocked at 2.8ghz and not a lot of memory. However, it runs well and boots quickly.
    
    I wanted to build a simple jukebox using the default player Rhythmbox and get the wireless card working so that i could load all my cd's and automatically find the cd titles from CDDB over the wireless lan.
    
    Sounds simple.
    
    My wireless driver is b43legacy from Broadcom and i know that they do not exactly make it easy for users to use their chips under Linux. But in my case it turned out not to be a driver problem but a utility called RFKILL which was not fixed until i think 2.6.38 of the kernel. This kernel, last time i looked is not even the latest kernel that ships with Ubuntu. Why not? No idea!
    
    It took me days and a lot of searching and patch loading and editing to find this out. Now it works great with the new kernel.
    
    Rythmbox, also worked well for a few hours then suddenly stopped finding CD titles from MusicBrainz, a CDDB alternative.
    
    I should also say that i save the cd's as flac files, just in case someone says ahh but!
    
    So what to do,,,download Banshee and try that......great worked well for some time then it too developed a problem where it would not write the titles correctly into the menu frames.
    
    Then another problem surfaced where the cd ripper, i tried several including soundjuicer, would take an age to rip a cd. Up to 40 minutes in some cases. (Trying also a cd that before ripped in about 7 minutes)
    
    So you trawl the forums again looking for explanations and find you are not alone and in Banshees case, discover that many of your problems are allegedly fixed in version 2.1 which was supposed to be released on the 13th July. Where is it?
    
    In summary, Ubuntu has more bugs than a tramps underpants and while it looks good and even feels good i can believe the first commentars suggestion that business should not go near it.
    
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    1. Friday 29th July 2011 15:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Well to be fair
      
      None of the issues you noted would be of any concern to a business user looking to build a cloud...
      
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      1. Friday 29th July 2011 17:30 GMT bill 36
        
        agreed
        
        But it does not fill one with confidence does it, when they don't appear to be able to get the basics right.
        
        The forums are full of bugs and problems that business users would not want to see.
        
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Friday 29th July 2011 17:24 GMT Rambo Tribble

Taking up the slack?

Are we in store for more such salacious headlines, to compensate for the loss of News of the World? The Reg goes tabloid?

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Friday 29th July 2011 17:31 GMT jspaleta

Why not a utility pricing model?

The flat 16k pricetag per year seems a bit out of step to me.

Recently we've seen RedHat introduce a utility pricing scheme for access to RHEL on Amazon's EC2. This seems like a much more natural way to approach service and support costs that fits with how public cloud instances are expensed. You pay an hourly rate for cpu and band _and_ support.

But this flat cost...which cost the same for 1 active instance as it does for 100 active instances, no matter if 98 of them sit idle for 3/4 of the year until you need to scale for high loads? This seems completely at odds with the economic factors that make cloud computing, and all utility computing, attractive. I simply don't understand why Canonical would do it that way, it seems sort of backwards and out of step with where the sector is going.

I hope it works out for Canonical, but it feels like a misstep in the pricing model. Unfortunately since they are a private held company, we won't really know if their flat pricing model is a boom or a bust, there's no quarterly reports or guidance statements to tease information from.

-jef

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