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Sun and Canonical to bring Ubuntu 8.04 to x86 Servers
Apr. 03, 2008

Sun was the first major company to give Ubuntu a shot at making the big server show in May 2006. Then, the deal was all about putting Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) on the UltraSPARC T1 processor on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. The 2008 version of the partnership between Sun and Ubuntu's parent company, Canonical, is all about putting the forthcoming UTS version of Ubuntu, 8.04, on Sun's x86 servers.

Ubuntu 8.04, however, will no longer be officially supported on SUN's SPARC processor line. Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu's chief technology officer and chairman of the Ubuntu Technical Board, announced in a Technical Board report March 11 that "the officially released architectures for Ubuntu 8.04 will be i386 and amd64. The SPARC port will continue to be provided with build infrastructure, and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, 7.04 and 7.10 will continue to enable SPARC deployments well into the future, but there will not be an official Ubuntu 8.04 release for SPARC."

According to sources close to both Sun and Canonical, the reason for this shift from SPARC to AMD Opteron is that there has been little demand for Ubuntu on SPARC. Sun's SPARC servers will, of course, still be available with Solaris.

Having made this shift, Sun is making a strong commitment to Ubuntu on its AMD server family. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu and Ubuntu Linux's founder, said that "Sun will be certifying Ubuntu on a range of Sun x86 servers, not SPARC servers."

The two companies are doing more than just officially certifying and supporting Ubuntu on Sun's AMD-based servers. In an e-mail to Linux-Watch, Shuttleworth said, "In addition to the x86 server certification effort, we have done extensive work around the Java stack in Ubuntu. 8.04 LTS will include packages of OpenJDK, and we expect it to be fully TCK [Technology Compatibility Kit]-certified as a basis for additional work we are doing around Glassfish, NetBeans and other Java components. A goal is to make Ubuntu 8.04 LTS even better for Java-based Web app servers."

Ubuntu, which is most popular as a desktop Linux operating system, will also soon be supported and certified on Dell servers. Dell was also the first major PC vendor to deliver any pre-installed Linux, Ubuntu 7.04, on its desktop and laptop lines.

With these moves, Canonical continues to show its intentions of being an enterprise Linux player as well as its popularity with individual Linux users.


Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols



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