Ubuntu Gaining Popularity For Businesses
Ubuntu is currently the most popular desktop Linux distribution. However, it is also rapidly gaining popularity among businesses around the world, according to the latest survey by Canonical and open source analyst firm RedMonk.
Almost 7,000 respondents, mostly from North America and Europe, took part in the survey. The vast majority of respondents are users of Ubuntu already, while many also use several other distributions such as Debian, Centos and Red Hat Enterprise. Survey results are separated by business size, depending on the number of employees.
Respondents were asked questions about what applications they are currently running on Ubuntu servers, and what applications they considered to be mission-critical for their business. Web servers, database servers, backups and firewalls were among the list of common, mission-critical applications.
There is a strong connection between the actual uses of Ubuntu servers and the usual mission-critical applications, which suggests that Ubuntu is sufficient for these important tasks. Almost 60 percent of small businesses, who make up just over half of the sample, are running 1-5 mission-critical applications, while 40 percent of large enterprises are doing the same. Furthermore, when explicitly asked if they thought Ubuntu was capable of running these core applications, 90 percent of respondents answered positively.
According to RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, “It's not a validation that... [Ubuntu is] ready to compete head-to-head with Red Hat for each enterprise account... but it does put lie to the claim that Ubuntu is nothing more than a desktop OS.”
Almost 100 percent of business representatives who participated in the survey said they would deploy more Ubuntu servers in the future.
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hell yes! Ubuntu is an amazing distro.
I wonder if they know they are ruining their hard drives with excessive load cycles.
That is the reason why I do not use Ubuntu. 3 to 4 load cycles per minute is unhealthy for any hard drive. The power management in Ubuntu is horrible.
At work we have two file servers running ubuntu/samba. They are both joined to active directory, and could not be more seamlessly integrated (we're using an AD partition for the idmap too). I guess that is as much a testament to samba as anything...but it was really simple to get working on ubuntu. It has become clear to me that as an OS, Ubuntu Server is plenty worthy of being used in critical roles. It fits our needs, at least.
I wonder if they know they are ruining their hard drives with excessive load cycles.That is the reason why I do not use Ubuntu. 3 to 4 load cycles per minute is unhealthy for any hard drive. The power management in Ubuntu is horrible.
If they are capable of running update then I think they'll be okay. That issue was fixed in the middle of January. Also, the bug tracker runs back to 2006 for that bug and it was widely shown that Ubuntu was not the only OS to have issues. It was linked to BIOS/ hard disk firmware issues. Whether or not a system exhibited symptoms depended on whether their OS trusted the disk's default acpi/apm parameters or set its own. In some situations WinXP was shown to cycle even more frequently than Ubuntu.
yep, ubuntu is great, ubuntu is on my computers
won't change it to windows ever 
it's sooooooooooooooooo good, stable, easy to use and flexible...
If they are capable of running update then I think they'll be okay. That issue was fixed in the middle of January. Also, the bug tracker runs back to 2006 for that bug and it was widely shown that Ubuntu was not the only OS to have issues. It was linked to BIOS/ hard disk firmware issues. Whether or not a system exhibited symptoms depended on whether their OS trusted the disk's default acpi/apm parameters or set its own. In some situations WinXP was shown to cycle even more frequently than Ubuntu.
That is good to know.
A couple other issues I had were to do with my usb headset and my wireless card. Any idea if the sound issues have been fixed?
That is good to know.A couple other issues I had were to do with my usb headset and my wireless card. Any idea if the sound issues have been fixed?
I'm pretty certain wireless support has been growing steadily but I'm not sure on the sound issue. I only have the two boxes running the server version text only so I don't get much exposure to sound, wireless, 3d issues...etc.
With noatime on it's probably one of the better (if not best) os'es around to run from a flash drive!
Someone online posted his totally silent PC, that had a special powersection with a low rpm fan as the only fan in the PC.
He ran his OS from a USB stick, and used large passive cooling for his CPU(although nowadays with the Atom one is more than able to get by with a small passive sink).
What differs Ubuntu from other Linux Os-es is it's wide support!
There are lots of drivers to choose from, but most of the time Ubuntu just works OOB, unlike many other Linux os'es.!
Ubuntu in my eyes is like a free Windows 98, with advanced graphics and menu's, and is much more user friendly when changing custom settings. (you can literally mod everything in a linux distro).
With Ubuntu on the rise, I expect more cyber-crime to happen on this OS.
The safest OS is probably redhat or some other linux distro. I wouldn't want to bet my company's secure data on Ubuntu!
The computer lab at my highschool needed a simple fileserver. We tried windows xp (which came with the computer we were using), but it limited itself to like 8 connections and told us to buy windows server edition. Rather than buy a ridiculously expensive windows OS with way more features than we wanted, we installed ubuntu, and it worked great, with no arbitrary connection limits.
I would imagine ubuntu is perfect for small businesses that just need a mail server, file server and print server, and don't want to pay for all of the fluff that windows server now forces customers to buy.
I currently have a tri-boot (Ubuntu Intrepid, Windows XP, Windows 7 Beta), and I use Ubuntu for everything except gaming. OpenOffice.org 3.0 will open anything from Office 07 (2.4 couldn't claim that), so I can see why businesses would be using it.
"OpenOffice.org 3.0 will open anything from Office 07"
THAT'S GREAT NEWS! I am a network administrator for a college and students constantly complain about needing office 07 (as if they expect me to hook them up or something) now i will point them to this!
on the other hand i was a HEAVY redhat/fedora core user as far as using it for a mailserver, ftp, dns, samba, apache....now i have a silent PC with a solid state drive a little more advanced than above that i plan as using for my firewall....and should only take a weekend to figure out how to get mail...ect... working!
GREAT O.S. the ONLY one where you can actually update firefox on the fly!!!!
funny thing is that i read about a macbook owner frustrated with OSX and he blew away the harddrive and installed ubuntu on it.
that was GREAT! and such a low blow for the apple folks on their own forum! LOL!
"Ubuntu in my eyes is like a free Windows 98, with advanced graphics and menu's, and is much more user friendly when changing custom settings. (you can literally mod everything in a linux distro)."
Strange, I was just going to say that vista is like an expensive Ubuntu 7.04. Without the ability to update software other than the OS itself, and the inclusion of an office suite or photoshop equivalent (sorry, paint doesn't count). Or the ability to give you control your computer to any serious extent (think the difference between driving a car with a manual and automatic transmission). Oh, but it does have a handy 10 TCP connection limit to stop you from making too many connections to other machines and spreading viruses and worms. Neither of which you'd see running anything but windows. So basically its a fisher-price operating system.
Seriously you choose win98 for the comparison? The last time I had a win98 install I had a hard limit of 4 months I'd run it before reinstalling due to the fact that things would just randomly stop working. I'd be lucky to get though a day without a crash. The only way I've managed to get ubuntu to misbehave like that is to go nuts installing pre-release software.
"OpenOffice.org 3.0 will open anything from Office 07"
Pity ubuntu still has 2.4.1 in it. You can use the ppa repositories to get a RC version of 3.0, but it's not entirely bugfree (strange behaviour of the COUNTIF function in calc was enough to get me running back to 2.4.1 for our business' spreadsheets). Still, looking forward to 3.0 getting stable enough for inclusion in the distro.
9.04 will be out soon....hopefully it will/should have open office 3.0
Damn... I just checked my mythtv front end (running ubuntu 8.10) and it's running openoffice 2.4.
tried a "sudo apt-get upgrade openoffice" it found the repository but upgraded 0 pagages....guess we do have the latest stable version for ubuntu.
seriously awaiting 9.10 and the restricted nvidia drivers that support VDPAU (h.264 acceleration in linux) and mythtv 0.22 for the hd pvr support....i have this equipment standing by in my closet....
Yeah, as a previous poster mentioned, 3.0 isn't completely stable. But you can get a .deb at the OpenOffice.org site.
funny thing is that i read about a macbook owner frustrated with OSX and he blew away the harddrive and installed ubuntu on it.that was GREAT! and such a low blow for the apple folks on their own forum! LOL!
You probably read about it the day it was posted. The following day I'm sure it had been removed from Apple's forum. They make a habit of censorship.
Ubuntu is great for business environments for many reasons. I find a few really helpful reasons are:
1. It has secure networking and it avoids a lot of potential malware and virus threats.
2. It has better control over user accounts and the software run on client machines.
3. It has simpler and faster private networking. (I actually found it easier to use SAMBA to connect to a windows network than Windows. I was also surprised how much faster it was than MS's VPN)
4. Most importantly. It has the easiest update and upgrade management and deployment. A few clicks and its done for all your software not just OS related stuff.
5. No need to reboot every time you update.
6. You can network Mac/Win/Linux machines easily. (Actually, I don't know about networking it with Macs as I have only networked Win and Linux machines but I assume since Mac OS X is based on Unix, there should be no problem.)
7. It runs well on low spec computers.
All of these reasons besides being free.
I use Win XP at home but only for the latest 3D game and music software compatibility. If I didn't have this need, I would drop XP in a heartbeat.