Today Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 9.04.
What makes this release stand out from previous Ubuntu releases is the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services is the first commercially-supported Linux distribution that enables businesses to build private cloud environments inside their firewalls. Companies will now be able to create their own private clouds pretty easily.
The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is powered by open source system known as Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus API matches Amazons EC2 API. If you really are dying to create your own private cloud, check out the Ubuntu Eucalyptus Getting Started documentation.
Besides supporting creating private clouds, Ubuntu 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Thanks to the work of Alestic and others, creating an Ubuntu EC2 instance was quite simple. With Ubuntu 9.04, Canonical is taking more of a leading role in helping customers deploy Ubuntu EC2 instances.
Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang. A few of the Erlang web frameworks were refusing to compile – again. As usual, the error message being thrown by Erlang was as cryptic as Aramaic spoken with a lisp. Nothing turned up in Google about the error. I even hopped on the #erlang channel on IRC hopping to get a few pointers.
No one had a direct answer, but I did get a clue. One person mentioned that Erlang is very good telling you vary far in advance if there will be any breaking changes in future releases. I also found out that I was using an Alpha release. Not good, not good at all.
So armed with this new information and a few hunches, I un-installed Erlang (again) and download the last stable release – R12B-5 at the time of this article. Here’s what I did.
sudo apt-get libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
tar xvzf otp_src_R12B-5.tar.gz
cd otp_src_R12B-5/
./configure
make
sudo make install
I had to install libncurses5 and libncurses5-dev since it wasn’t installed on my Ubuntu development VM.
After building Erlang from source, I went back to compile my code and everything worked. Erlang is definitely death by 1,000 cuts. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.
