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Evidently Novell should be afraid – very afraid – because Canonical with its Ubuntu distribution, Dell's little playmate, the Linux Dell's pre-loading on a few of its PCs, clearly has designs on Novell's place in line behind Red Hat, the Linux leader.

On Thursday, the Ubuntu world traded up from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon, the alliterative code name for Ubuntu 7.10, which Canonical is going to use to start pushing into servers, knowing, it says, that it's going to take years.

So far Ubuntu, a relative latecomer, has made its bones as a relatively user-friendly desktop, but – although it's only been in the server business a year – it's increasingly being recognized as a server contender, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttlesworth, who reels off a list of its notices and describes this seventh release as a "world-class enterprise operating system."

The other company that's gonna be under attack, Shuttlesworth claims, is Microsoft, because Linux' displacement of Unix is over. There's no more growth in replacing Unix, he says, so by default that leaves Windows to be cannibalized.

Of course, such a thing needs multinational OEMs picking Ubuntu up and so far, other than Dell's modest commitment, Ubuntu on the server side has only attracted some off-brand vendors in emerging countries who are pre-installing it.

It's reportedly working it – hoping of course for Dell – but the key to the door is demand and although Shuttleworth claims "fantastic adoption levels" for the Ubuntu server, it's still unclear how Dell is doing with its Ubuntu-bundled PCs – not moving much, it's imagined – and although Sun signed on as a supporter a while back, nothing has been heard of it since.

Canonical is also counting on continuity and the fact that users of Ubuntu on the desktop might spec it on the server too.

Ubuntu claims six millions users though there's no registration or monitoring – and can't tell which are desktops and which servers. It counts IP addresses on its update sites.

Since this is a long-term effort, enterprise accounts may find Gutsy Gibbon's follow-on, Hardy Heron, more attractive. Due out in six months, it'll have more bells and whistles of course and will also be supported for five years as opposed to Gibbon's 18 months.

The enterprise likes that sort of thing, especially since Canonical makes a "concerted effort," Shuttlesworth says, to certify ISV applications and server models for what are called Long Term Support (LTS) releases.

DB2 was certified in 2005; a budding deal with Oracle went down with the tubes; Oracle has its own Linux. Canonical's trying for WebSphere, Lotus Notes and Domino.

Gutsy Gibbon includes improved server security – complements of what used to be – until a few minutes ago – Novell's own AppArmor widgetry – better hardware support, power efficiency and more virtualization facilities including a stripped-down kernel for virtual appliances. There's improved device support along with a new framework for getting drivers out as they're developed, desktop search and sexy 3D graphics acceleration on the desktop via a production version of Compiz.

Shuttlesworth says hardware folk have become more amenable to accommodating Linux.

Gibbon also borrows from the NTFS-3G project to offer read/write access to Windows NTFS partitions on a dual-boot machine.

NTFS-3G interfaces with Microsoft's proprietary file system but Shuttlesworth is unperturbed by Microsoft's patent bluster or threat of any potential legal liability. He's convinced "Microsoft is not going to put itself at risk on IP grounds" and sue.

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative and Debian was never much for meeting schedules. Canonical, on the other hand, prides itself on the fact that Ubuntu is different and has almost unfailingly met its every-six-month update schedule on the nose. Its trick to doing that is to jettison any new technology that would make it late. Shuttlesworth figures that about 80% of Ubuntu's to-do list makes it.

To-do lists are written every six months at Ubuntu summits. The one for Hardy Heron is about to take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The scheme is closer to the way the Linux kernel is developed than the way Red Hat and Novell operate. Canonical also makes no distinction between its freebie community code and its subscription code. It's a purer open source code model.

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