On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

Late last month, Canonical made an astonishing announcement: an optimized image of Ubuntu Desktop is now available from Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. This wonderful new feature is primarily intended for Windows 10 Pro desktop users needing to run Ubuntu Desktop guest virtual machines.

Ubuntu changed networking. Embrace the YAML.

AI: open source's next big win.

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package. I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

Linux is engineered with security in mind. In fact, the most fundamental security mechanisms are built right in to the kernel itself, which makes it extremely hard for malicious code to bypass.

Canonical has announced plans to switch all versions of Ubuntu to its new Snappy package manager. The new tool offers the promise of greater stability and security for the system and applications.

In this article, I've decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not in my column directly, but as a feature article called "PXE Magic" in the April 2008 issue.

BeOS was a much loved and highly advanced desktop operating system that ceased active development in 2001. ZevenOS is a Ubuntu 11.10 based system (with a bit of help from Xubuntu) that attempts to recapture some of the BeOS look and feel.

It's starting to look like the end of an era for Ubuntu users as Canonical mull the creation of an ISO that won't fit onto a CDR. The question is, does it matter?

There are a wealth of changes which can be made to an Ubuntu system that sit in a category that is half way between the obscure and the genuinely useful. Ubuntu Tweak is utility that exposes these options with a handy GUI.