Here on The Fridge, we've covered some of the exciting work going on with the Ubuntu port to Sun's new UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) architecture, but now the cat is out of the bag — Canonical will be supporting Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on SPARC, with particular focus on the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. Wow! A few quotes to tell the story…
John Fowler in the Sun press release:
“Ubuntu is arguably one of the most important – if not the most important – GNU/Linux distribution on the planet and will soon blaze new trails in support for SPARC-based servers.”
I would credit the Linux/SPARC community (and David Miller in particular), and the OpenSPARC community, with the speed of this port moving from “first code†to production supportable. When I first saw David speaking about Niagara support at LCA in Dunedin in January, we all thought that Dapper could support traditional SPARC at release but then get Niagara support some months later in an update.
But the fervour with which the community at large under David’s leadership attacked the problem has meant that Linux on Niagara has progressed far faster than we expected – so much so that the first SPARC CD release of Dapper (which will be uploaded a little after the other architectures when we make the Dapper release) will support most UltraSPARC T1 machines out of the box.
Why Ubuntu? Well, it's by far my favourite GNU/Linux (and I'm not alone – it was the system NexentaOS GNU/OpenSolaris was built from too), it's based on the rock that is Debian and best of all the company behind it has a very Software 3.0 approach to business. As Cote is quoted as saying on TechTarget, the possibilities with Ubuntu are fascinating.
So look forward to running a fully-supported Dapper Drake on some seriously sexy hardware!
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