Canonical is today bringing Snappy Ubuntu Core out of the cloud and into physical devices with the reveal of Snappy Core for smart devices.
First announced in December 2014, Snappy Core is a new lightweight Ubuntu distribution designed for the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) specifically. Before today, only the cloud image had been revealed, but now the company is showing off its work on real connected devices.
I have no idea what any of this means in normal-people-speak.
Kind of looks like they’ve taken a stripped down Ubuntu OS and replaced the package manager with something with better transactional awareness (so updates either work or don’t apply; no half-baked updating of your OS).
“IoT” is just marketing speak for embedded, internet-connected devices.
This stuff is either for developers or marketing people… nothing normal about either of those groups (and I speak as a developer, so no offense intended).
Correction:
“IoT” is just marketing speak for tivo’d raspberry pies in all your stuff.
In one way, yes. But IoT is the internet presence of anything you can imagine. Be it a person equipped with a chip that monitors the heart and is connected to the internet, an house (domotic), a dog (say you want to know where he is or if is healthy) or any object you can think of. Like a chair, where you want to know if its occupied or not, and so on.
So, IoT is the spirit of something in the internet. An interesting topic, if you ask me. For good or bad, that’s where we are going.
I have a pair of eyes. Whilst they are getting a bit old they can still see if a chair is occupied.
If that is what the IoT is all about then I’ll pass thanks.
Sadly it is and none of us will be able to pass.
Like those endless updates to Flash that seemingly appear almost daily and where even one version out of date won’t work, I fear that devices with the IoT embedded will stop working if they can’t get a daily/hourly/secondly fix from their mothership.
Hey perhapy the won’t even start working in the first place if they can’t say hello to their real owner (not you idiot) and the NSA.
Please someone stop this madness or else stop the world, I wanna get off.
eldarion,
If you ask me, it’s just a buzzword with very little substance
Seriously though, if we can tether this IoT to IPv6, then maybe we could get some real progress.
Oh my god it’s just marketing jargon
Canonical is still trying to find a better funding source for its operations. They’re still losing money developing Ubuntu.
That’s why they’re trying to get into the phone/tablet market.
And this potentially will get paying customers for them in the embedded space, at least that’s the hope.
So while Ubuntu isn’t my favorite distro, I hope they figure out how to make money. Maybe this is it? I’m not too hopefull.
As this is a non nerds view of ubuntu, I doubt much that it will take of on phones!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI
Well, for what its worth my non techy brothers are on ubuntu,because it works better on their machines.
I’m surprised that people here haven’t been following this more closely. Ubuntu Core is actually really cool, and has elements that fans of NixOS and GoboLinux will recognize.
Each package is installed in an extremely lightweight lxc container, and as such runs as if in a virtual machine with “just enough OS” for its purposes. The old apt-get wasn’t about this sort of design, but installation on one physical machine. Containers offer a way to keep things more compartmentalized while sharing the same kernel and drivers, rather like chroots or jails. Building a package manager around this with full rollback is awesome – you can package your favored tools and environment and upgrade them or move them onto new hardware with very little fuss and almost no chance of bricking the system.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/09/canonical-launches-snappy-edition-…
Edited 2015-01-20 21:25 UTC
Does this mean that each container has its own copy of the shared libraries?
Basically yes. However you could of course do clever packaging and overlaying to avoid this.
But in the end the approach of using btrfs deduplication of Lennart Pöttering and Co’s vision seems to be the best solution for that kind of problem.
Though btrfs deduplication needs a long way to go until its really usable.
From kernel version 3.6 batch-mode dedup is safe as long as you don’t have -o auto_defragment in mount options, from version 3.9 it’s safe even then, so it is already useable.
Online-mode dedup is still not useable, I agree on that.
Thom ~ “I have no idea what any of this means in normal-people-speak.”
Yeah, and I was looking forward to an explanation… I’ve got no clue, but it sounds really, really cool. Funny how Ubuntu has Snappy “Core” and MS has “OneCore”. The word “Core” must be the “new black” in marketing jargon. All I know is that my next product is going to have the word “Core” in it — “Yes, you too can have the new CX2 Core Hairbrush for three easy payments…”
Last April Linux Weekly News reviewed CoreOS, and it sounds a lot like the description of Ubuntu Core, except CoreOS is for servers, while Ubuntu core is for devices.
CoreOS uses overlayfs on top of ext4.
Just shows you how ahead of the curve Fedora is. They’ve already dropped core, and are on to “Next”. Look for that to be everywhere in another 9-10 years.
Minimal requirements are: 600Mhz CPU and 128Mb or RAM. You can run almost any Linux distro on that.
If it was possible to run it un microcontrollers and provide real time capabilities, it would have been much more interesting.
If you can use a beaglebone black or odroid board in your robot/drone/whatever, why not use Arch or Debian?
They mention this yet another Linux distro is intended for IoT. If I want to design a light switch which I can control on the Internet and I want to use Snappy Ubuntu Core, I have to cram a beaglebone in that light switch. I would have to drill a very large hole in my wall.