Does Peppermint Ice, the new cloud-oriented desktop distro, have what it takes to do for desktops what Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks?

A fast-booting, cloud-oriented, "Peppermint OS" Ubuntu variant has been downloaded 25,000 times in its first week. Meanwhile, Red Hat clone CentOS has been released in version 5.5, adding features including enhanced KVM virtualization and improved WiFi support, and pioneering Linux distro-maker Mandriva is up for sale.

For the past few releases, Canonical has put quite a bit of energy into making Ubuntu a first-class OS for use in the cloud. Ubuntu now has cloud support for Amazon’s EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (a “private cloud” system based on Eucalyptus).

Earlier this year a pair of developers put out a new distribution called Peppermint OS. The new distro, which has close family ties to Ubuntu, is an experiment in combining the traditional desktop computing model with cloud-based application

Have you been wanting to fly to the cloud, to experiment with cloud computing? Now is your chance. With this article, we will step through the process of setting up a private cloud system using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is powered by the Eucalyptus platform.

After tons of popularity surrounding the Peppermint OS release last month, today Cloud lovers get a treat in the first release of Peppermint Ice, version 07142010. Take a detailed look at the live CD, installation process, and popular applications in this Peppermint Ice screenshot review.

RightScale - a well-known cloud computing company - today announced "full support" for Ubuntu as part of the RightScale Cloud Management platform. It's big news. Here's why.

Ubuntu is converging quickly with cloud services. A prime example: Turnkey Linux is launching 12 Ubuntu Server Edition software appliances that users can deploy in various cloud services. The news comes only a few weeks after Canonical said Ubuntu 9.10 will leap into Amazon.com's cloud. I'm intrigued, but I wonder if customers will join the Ubuntu cloud party.

Alongside the desktop and server editions of Ubuntu, Canonical has put considerable effort into Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud recently.  This investment is poised to pay off with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), which will introduce several enhancements to the cloud-init package when it debuts next October 2010. Here's a preview of some of the changes that Ubuntu cloud users have to look forward to.