Samsung is not interested in PC division of HP. I am not surprised, these were pure speculations. I have - believe me or not - something different over here, because private company Canonical Ltd. (rev. 30 million USD) is about to be - wait for it - bought by VMware, Inc. (rev. 2.41 billion USD; NYSE: VMW; EMC Corporation holding). Really, this is possible.

Just give me few paragraphs. VMware's strategic target is to improve it's virtualization offering to have a complete set of tools and layers. They already have bunch of middleware stuff and operating system portfolio could likely be the missing piece. The top ten virtualization competitors has much more wider offering with OS - Red Hat, Microsoft/Citrix and Oracle as well as top cloud providers like Google, Amazon or Apple (yes - I already count with Apple in the cloud market).

VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics in 2008 to improve graphics in their virtualization products. In 2009, it was SpringSource middleware. And in 2010 VMware acquired GemStone and Zimbra, followed by CloudFoundry, SlideRocket and Socialcast this year. While VMware is buying more and more cloud providers, their most important cloud product VMware vSphere support RHEL, SLES, Solaris and - guess what - Ubuntu.

Remember when Canonical introduced Ubuntu JeOS, minimized server linux operating system with VMware tools pre-installed? That time Ubuntu was the most downloaded OS on the VMware Appliances Marketplace. Today, there is no possibility to sort by download count, but we can assume Ubuntu is still a high-up there. The year of 2007 was pretty rich when speaking about Canonical and VMware cooperation. VMware Server was added to the official repositories, yet VMware was not interested that time.

Latest LTS release of Ubuntu Server is certified on VMware ESX. There's no doubt the partnership is strong. We can find many other announcements in that year year. VMware's Cloud Foundry was said to play prominent role on Ubuntu 11.10. Now starting with the 11.10 release both the VMC Client, and VCAP server functionality will be available directly as Ubuntu packages created by Canonical. Their partnership is definitely tighter.

It is not as fast as one would expect, but VMware is getting there. Oh, by the way. Zimbra, last VMware acquisition of the year 2010, is long-term Ubuntu partner. They develop on Ubuntu and they support Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is already the core OS behind VMware's service. So what do you think? Could be Canonical on sale?

;-)