Sun Microsystems and Canonical Ltd, a sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux project, announced the operating system will be supported on the Niagara platform in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.
Ubuntu version 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) will arrive with support for Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 processors that power the company’s Niagara-class servers. Canonical said it and the Ubuntu community were able to port the operating system to the processor quickly with the access available through the OpenSPARC project.
Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, cited that community’s ongoing work with the operating system on SPARC processors as providing a good lead-in to official support for it on SPARC-based servers. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS should be available sometime in June 2006.
Canonical provided more details on the forthcoming release:
The next release of Ubuntu, version 6.06 LTS, will include a dedicated server edition with an extended support period to meet the needs of enterprise customers, independent software and hardware vendors (ISVs and IHVs.) With the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, SPARC will become one of Ubuntu’s officially supported server architectures.
Ubuntu is available free of charge and includes free security updates for all officially supported architectures. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server support will be available for a period of five (5) years. Canonical will also offer technical support for SPARC-based systems on a paid, commercial basis.
The announcement could be the beginning of a new challenge to Red Hat for a place in the enterprise market. Red Hat has focused its business on serving and supporting corporate customers only, as the company discarded its desktop distributions and support in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Canonical cited Distrowatch in calling Ubuntu the world’s most popular distribution for desktop users. If a number of those users are system administrators by trade, they could be key in helping Ubuntu find its way into some business datacenters using Sun’s latest servers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
