Dell released for developers an ultrabook with Ubuntu

Dell has released an XPS 13 Ultrabook in the U.S. and Canada with Ubuntu 12.04 installed, customized for application developers and system administrators, writes The H Open. For example, the team sputnikallows developers to easily replicate the development environment on other machines.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (codenamed Sputnik) uses a 3 GHz Intel Ivy Bridge i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of disk space, a 13-inch screen (1366x768) and an integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics card. The laptop is still available for the United States and Canada only and is priced at $ 1,449.

Dell has made some changes to the Ubuntu 12.04 vanilla core, which are also available.to PPA on Launchpad. Sputnik includes a profile tool that allows developers to use pre-configured development environments from the GitHub repository. Developers can also create their own profiles and share them with others. Profiles can include various aspects of environments, such as application settings, configuration files, and bash profile settings. Since this tool uses git, version control is automatically performed for all of these parameters.

Another tool is called Cloud Launcher.and is based on Canonical's Juju. Cloud Launcher allows users to locally create and test a project they are working on, and then upload it to a cloud service such as Amazon EC2. Both tools and other Sputnik modifications can be installed from an image available on Ubuntu servers.