Mark Shuttleworth founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd. has told The Wall Street Journal that smartphones running the open source operating system Ubuntu, will be available for customers to purchase in October 2013 in “two large geographic markets” though which ones exactly remains to be seen.

We can assume that one of the two markets is likely to be North America with Shuttleworth saying that North America is “absolutely a key market for Ubuntu.”

The mobile version of the operating system was announced last month and, optimised for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, will be  available to application developers in February.

While is it still unknown which smartphones will be running the OS, Canonical has said  that it will be easy for Android phone manufacturers to convert to its platform.