While other vendors are actively pursuing Mobiles and innovation surrounding it, Dell and Canonical are driving innovation in the desktop, notebook and laptop space. There are ongoing debates on Ubuntu ranging from Canonical Ubuntu being seen as a threat to Microsoft, one-third of Dell notebooks being sold with Ubuntu pre-installed, Ubuntu being used as one another OS in the desktop and not possibly as a replacement for Windows and also about the market share of Ubuntu still not significant enough to be considered mainstream. In spite of all that, definitely Ubuntu has raised sufficient interest about Linux becoming a successful desktop OS.

The term Ubuntu sounds quite unique and so tried to trace the source of it and came to this. Ubuntu is a South African ethical ideology focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. A rough translation of the principle of Ubuntu is “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.

Canonical website says “Ubuntu is an entirely open source operating system built around the Linux Kernel. The ideals of Ubuntu Philosophy is that: software should be available free of charge, software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit”.

The philosophy indeed sounds good especially when seen in relation to the mobile OS space. While Apple is closed and proprietary raising concerns of vendor lock-in and Google’s Android being open but misused by the telecom service providers who load the instrument with their own software – closed and proprietary – and charging the customers.

From Enterprise context, they say “Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the enterprise edition”.  I guess we have to wait and watch to see how much of this they stand by when the adoption really gets significant.

Ubuntu aims at providing the best in translations and accessibility features with the intention of making it usable for as many people as possible. As in any other open community initiative, Ubuntu invites help from the community especially in translating to local languages.

Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux – widely acclaimed, technologically advanced and well supported – and aims to provide an up-to-date linux distribution for desktop as well as server computing. The key strength is the powerful package management system that allows easy installation and clean removal of programs. Ubuntu is shipped with only limited list of packages and aims at providing less number of widely used applications of high quality.

Ubuntu is released regularly – and a new release is made every six months. There are two views to it that frequent releases are leading to buggy software putting off traditional Linux supporters and the other view that the longer term – like 18 months of Red hat – is more suitable for server OS whereas the Desktop users like to have the latest. Since each release is supported for at least 18 months and enterprise edition supported for 3 years, the users do have a choice of using the latest or the relatively bug-free earlier versions.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, recently announced the release of uTouch 1.0, Ubuntu’s multi-touch and gesture stack. The multitouch interface that enables the device to detect several simultaneous contact points with a touch screen or trackpad is prominent on iPhone, iPad and Mac laptops. And slowly this more intuitive and physical way of interacting with the computer is gaining as a mainstream approach. This is seen as the response of Canonical to the growing mobile market by bringing the natural tactile experience of the world to the Linux desktop and future innovations are also expected to toe the mobile line.

With Ubuntu 10.10, users and developers have an end-to-end touch-screen framework – from the kernel to the applications. The stack includes an open source gesture recognition engine and gesture APIs that enable applications to obtain and use gesture events from the uTouch gesture engine.

While some see this move of Ubuntu would enable it to improve its market foothold, doubts on how inituitive these gestures are and concerns on lack of standards in this area are being raised.  The next releases can be expected to address these more effectively. According to Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical:

• In Ubuntu’s case, there will be some standards. One convention to be employed is that people will tell the computer what type of operation they want to perform by starting it with a particular number of finger touches–a number that can be changed mid-gesture as needed.
• Rather than single, magic gestures, it would be made possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated sentences.
• The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions.

Canonical has an impressive list of partners especially so in the cloud space. It also has implementation partners across the globe.

Considering all these, the possibility of Open Source and GNU based Linux getting its due share in the desktop space seems more probable than ever before.

As mobile devices become sophisticated and the possibility of mobile adoption in Enterprises move to the next level, mobile operating systems gain importance. Mobile Operating systems are the operating systems that are present in Smartphones – Nokia Symbian OS, RIM Blackberry OS, Apple iPhone IOS, Windows mobile Phone OS, Google Andriod and Palm WebOS.

Mobile device manufacturers chose the Operating system that comes with their mobile devices – hopefully we can expect the industry to mature sufficient enough to allow mix and match – though not in the immediate future. The operating system determines the functions and features like track wheel, track ball, track pad, keyboard, WAP, application synchronization, email available on the device. The operating system also limits the third-party applications that can be used.

Mobile Operating Systems are typically derived from the standard operating systems – Linux, BSD, NextSTEP and Windows. Quite a few of these are closed source and proprietary. In the consumer space, Symbian OS has become the standard operating system and is licensed by more than 85% of the world’s smartphone manufacturers. MeeGo (unveiled in 2010 Mobile World Congress) from Nokia and Intel, Android from Google that are built on top of Linux are Open source.

With the success in the consumer space, most of these OS providers and manufacturers have been targeting Enterprise Mobile OS market and there has been a series of announcements in 2010 that shows tremendous momentum.

But Consumer space and Enterprise space requirement of mobiles are quite tangential to each other. Consumer targeted device is built for social interaction and entertainment is expected to be open, connecting, seamless integration with social networking sites.  

Enterprises need a different class of mobile platform – that can provide improved security, reliability, and productivity, multi-tasking, centralized and remote management, enable compliance, and standard upgrade paths. Connectivity to email servers, preventing unauthorized access, controlling users from performing inappropriate actions, data encryption, preventing information leakage, ability to integrate with other Enterprise applications, ability to log activity and even retaining communications for compliance purposes are some of requirements that has to be addressed for Smartphones to move to Enterprise space. Vendors seem to be realizing this and are coming up with specific OS versions aimed at Enterprises.

RIM’s blackberry has already acquired a reputation and space for itself in employee’s mobile productivity in enterprises. BlackBerry Enterprise Servers – the middleware that is part of the BlackBerry wireless platform – connects to standard messaging and collaboration software including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise on enterprise networks. It also redirects emails and synchronization of information between servers, workstations and mobile devices. With the latest release BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.2, RIM claims to have provided a more operational and cost efficient solution. It supports single sign-on (SSO), new security features including self-service option, and support for Microsoft Hyper-V server virtualization.

Google’s Android OS 2.0 version aimed at Enterprise did not have many takers and received lot of negative feedback even to the extent that Android is not ready for Enterprise and Google is not even in the right direction. But the latest Android OS 2.2 (known as FroYo) released is showing promise and even the detractors are suggesting a relook at it. Remote Management and configuration, improved security, support for Exchange servers are the highlights of this release. More Enterprise friendly factors are expected in the next release (known as Gingerbread) promised before the end of this year.

Microsoft has announced that Windows Embedded Handheld OS based on Windows Mobile 6.5 technology will come out later this year and in 2011, release of a new version based on Windows Embedded Compact 7 OS is planned. This OS promises to provide richer and immersive user experience, improved reliability and security features and backward compatibility with a clear upgrade path.

Apple claims that iPhone OS 4 enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute in-house applications to employees over Wi-Fi and 3G. Most people agree that Apple iPhone and Google Android are both on par – in terms of current features and the expected trend. But Apple’s locked down device with Apple’s tight control over the hardware, software and content may go against it as compared to the open-source model of Android.

With current releases having sufficient features to interest the Enterprises and promised released in the near future with much more enterprise-friendly OSes, the enterprise adoption of mobiles can be better accessed in the second half of next year.