The newest version of Ubuntu is a big one, but not for the usual reasons. With Ubuntu 13.10 (aka Saucy Salamander) coming out tomorrow, the desktop and server editions will get some upgrades as always. But the biggest change is that Canonical is delivering the first stable version of Ubuntu for phones.

Beta versions of the mobile Ubuntu have been available to test for months, and now version 1.0 will be ready for supported devices, namely the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 phones. Preview versions have also been running on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, but Canonical isn't quite ready to declare Ubuntu stable for those larger touchscreens.

Ubuntu 14.04, slated for arrival in April 2014, is Canonical's target for delivering an operating system that runs on everything, including phones, tablets, desktops, and servers. Phones preinstalled with Ubuntu should also ship sometime in Q1 or Q2 next year, assuming Canonical can get the right deals in place with carriers and hardware makers.

While Ubuntu for phones runs well on a Galaxy Nexus or Nexus 4, the release is "really intended for carriers, OEMs, and enthusiasts and not general use," Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon told Ars.

On tablets, there are still some device-specific features that haven't been enabled. For example, on the Nexus 7, the camera doesn't work and the orientation won't shift to landscape mode, Bacon said.

But in getting Ubuntu for phones ready, Canonical has put the core pieces of its mobile platform together. That includes an app store and tools for developers to build apps and upload them.

Ubuntu for phones also includes Mir, the new display server that Canonical intends to use across its whole stack instead of the X window system. Mir itself is working fine on the desktop, but it won't ship with 13.10 for desktops because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn't yet able to properly support multimonitor setups.

Canonical is shooting to get Mir into the desktop in 14.04, assuming no unforeseen challenges pop up. "We will only bring Mir into 14.04 if we can be assured that we're not going to have any support issues," Bacon said. "Generally it works pretty good [on 13.10]. Mir itself is pretty rock solid."

Ubuntu 13.10 will be ready for download "at some point on Thursday," Bacon said. Canonical doesn't announce the time in advance because "otherwise the entire planet will hit Ubuntu.com at that time," he said.

Desktops and servers

In terms of immediate impact, the release of the desktop and server platforms affect more people than the phone release. But the desktop won't look dramatically different from 13.04.

"The desktop is seeing a little bit less feature development because most of the engineering has been focused on the phone," Bacon said.

New versions of LibreOffice, RhythmBox, and Firefox are included in 13.10, naturally.

One desktop feature that some will like and some will hate is called Smart Scopes, which greatly expands Internet search results in the Unity Dash. This effort began when Canonical added Amazon to the Dash. Smart Scopes brings results from many more sites such as Wikipedia, reddit, Foursquare, eBay, the Ubuntu One music store, and Grooveshark, Bacon said. Smart Scopes can be disabled if you prefer the Dash to search only your desktop instead of the whole Internet.

We have a full review of the desktop ready to roll tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Ubuntu Server 13.10, also available tomorrow, brings improvements targeted at businesses building private clouds and virtualization deployments. These include the latest version of the OpenStack cloud building software and upgrades to the Juju management software, which helps IT shops deploy applications to various cloud services.

"In 13.10, Juju can instantly deploy an entire software environment or service as a 'bundle' directly from the easy-to-use Juju GUI, improving on the previous deployment of individual components," Canonical said in a press release. "This reduces complexity and enables administrators to share entire complex workloads consisting of many related parts."

Juju can also manage LXC, or Linux Containers, a lightweight virtualization technology that lets users run multiple isolated Linux systems on a single physical or virtual machine.

"The Ubuntu LXC update in 13.10 provides blindingly fast (less than one second) and efficient cloning of containers for faster scaling of containerized services," Canonical said.

Ubuntu Server and Openstack are becoming an increasingly large part of Canonical's revenue. Although Canonical is not about to topple Linux server king Red Hat, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth told Ars recently that the company's server and Openstack business is profitable.

That stands in contrast to Canonical's overall business, which still loses money. Shuttleworth hopes his grand vision of a platform that extends from mobile phones to desktops, servers, and the cloud will ultimately push Canonical over the top.