“Maverick Meerkat is set to become the last version of Ubuntu that’ll run on Oracle’s Sparc, ending a four-year relationship. Also getting canned is Ubuntu running on Hewlett-Packard’s Itanic 64-bit challenger. Meerkat is currently in feature-freeze ahead of October’s official launch, and apparently nobody’s stepped up to maintain the Linux ports to either Sparc or Itanium. The Ubuntu Sparc port has fallen out of use and updates have slipped, meaning it’s fallen below the level of quality needed for an Ubuntu port. Ubuntu on HP’s IA64 is in slightly better shape, but – still – nobody’s actively maintaining it.”
Guess I’ll stick with Gentoo on my old Ultra 2 Enterprise, then. Good timing!
any real hope of ever making headway in the server realm. Sparc and IA64 are what most of the platforms in many enterprise data centers use. So much for any chance of Oracle developing a product for Ubuntu as well. Hard to convince them to go out of their way to develop a DB product with extremely limited hardware support in the enterprise–and without Oracle, many business just wont take them seriously and server edition will suffer for it.
Edited 2010-08-23 20:24 UTC
While i really like SPARC and ia64 as platforms, they just don’t have enough presence to justify time and effort on the development front from companies that are barely profitable as is. the developers time (for a desktop centric OS) is better spent on hardware that makes up the vast majority of it’s user base.
If/when Oracle resurrects SPARC then they might reconsider. Until then, this is the right move.