eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
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.”