To the Cloud!

People are Missing the Point of Dell's Project Sputnik

As I read through the Dell Sputnik launch articles on Engadget and Arstechnica, I was surprised to see everyone focused on the price and screen resolution of the hardware in the comments. This really leads me to believe that the messaging around the launch isn't quite right and people are missing the point of the project. Ars at least mentions that the release of two open source tools, the profile and cloud launcher, as 'the fun part'. However, that is pretty much ignored by people commenting to the post. Unfortunately, Engadget treated the launch as just another laptop to review.

 The point of the project, according to Dell, is to deliver four things. The first two focus on delivering a great OS/HW experience with Ubuntu on an XPS 13. The remaining and more important goals are the cloud launcher and profiling tool. The project delivered beta versions of the tools on GitHub around the same time as the hardware.

 The tools enable what Dell is calling the 'client-to-cloud' path and is a logical step for the company. Dell is a Gold level supporter of the OpenStack project. The company can sell networking, storage and server gear to customers looking to build an OpenStack cloud and even provide deployment tools to make that easier. With these new tools customers can now quickly embrace the new operating model the cloud provides.

 I really would like to see more discussion around cloud enablement rather then hardware specs of the project.

I do not work for Dell or have any vested interest in seeing this product succeed.

Ubuntu One to store configuration[Updated]

I have been intrigued about the Dell Sputnik project and the idea of developer profiles. While the project promises a Dell laptop running Ubuntu it is still not available for the average consumer. The great thing is they appear to be open sourcing the profile and cloud launching tools.

Since neither the tools nor laptop were available, I recently purchased a Lenovo IdeaPad with Windows 8. The first thing I did was to download and install Ubuntu 12.04 wiping out the Windows partition. I was able to get it up and running fairly quickly, but I didn't like that I was running the BIOS in legacy mode. I felt I needed to get it to work in EFI. So, after the second install... I was tired of configuring the settings and installing software manually.

 I roughly followed https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI.

I had seen a post on Techcrunch recently that Ubuntu had launched a beta version of a Mac Ubuntu One client. (I use Macs at home and work as my primary PCs) So I thought it would be cool to setup and create a Bash - Puppet repo script to rebuild my Ubuntu box and be able to access it from anywhere.  So now to rebuild the laptop to my liking after the install, I just load up Ubuntu One and run the bash script.

I suppose I could have used GitHub to store the script and then manually installed Git to get the script... but I wanted to play with Ubuntu One a bit.

I am new to Ubuntu and haven't moved over to using it for anything to useful yet. My next steps are to get LXC containers going and play with provisioning dev environments.

Update: I have noticed odd syncing issues where files are on some devices but not others. Not sure I'll stick with this solution.