Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, is looking to capture the business market by releasing a tool to administrate servers and desktop machines across a broad network. This is the first time a Linux distributor has sought to directly infiltrate the office environment largely held by Microsoft.
ArsTechnica: “Landscape makes it possible to remotely deploy patches, updates, and packages. It also provides extensive support for reporting and resource-usage analysis across groups of systems. In order to provide more flexible group management, Landscape allows administrators to organize groups of systems by using tags. Launchpad also includes an auditing framework that can show a history of actions performed on the local system as well as changes made by an administrator through Landscape.Landscape has support for ‘semi-connected management’ functionality, which will queue operations for systems that aren’t currently online and then perform the tasks when the system is once again network accessible. Semi-connected management makes it possible to manage systems that don’t consistently have connectivity, like laptops that are deployed in the field.”