“The Porting Team is proud to announce to the Ubuntu world the release of Breezy Badger for three shiny new architectures. The addition of IA64, HPPA (1.1 and later, here) and SPARC (UltraSPARC only, tftpboot/netinstall|cdboot/netinstall) will make Ubuntu available to communities sometimes neglected by other distributions.” Please note that the links point to files directly.
Cool might try the HPPA version on by B2000 workstation.
sounds like debian… whatyya know!
I was unware that running on these extra architectures sat outside the GPL. What a pillock.
How does it sit outside the GPL?
What for? They will end up like Debian, stuck in middleages with their releases just because they care about two or three people running linux on SPARC.
Except most multi-arch distros tend to direct the majority of developer power to the more widely used architectures, x86/ppc/amd64. While ppc64/sparc/hppa/mips/arm get’s a smaller team, as the hardware is not easy to obtain and the user base is not as substantial as x86 for instance.
What for? They will end up like Debian, stuck in middleages with their releases just because they care about two or three people running linux on SPARC.
From TFA:
None of these new architectures are officially supported by the Ubuntu team.
If we can get a large enough user base, we may be able to change that.
Jesus christ, 2 paragraphs in and you can’t read it yet you feel the need to comment?
UltraSPARC support is great news. Sun’s high-performance servers (8,12,24, etc. CPU’s) would be a very interesting platform for Ubuntu. So far this hardware has been available mainly for Solaris only.
Sun doesn’t really have very high performing servers.
If you want high performing, IBM’s 64 CPU POWER5+ systems are basically the highest performing enterprise systems out there, and they run Linux.
Or SGI’s 512 CPU Altix systems are the highest performing SSIs if you’re talking about combined raw FLOPS / OPS. And they run Linux.
Sun doesn’t really have very high performing servers.
And what about those optetron servers they sell
(Oh wait they ain’t sparc) but based on what I’ve seen, the sparcs are good enough to be usable on the server room.
If you want high performing, IBM’s 64 CPU POWER5+ systems are basically the highest performing enterprise systems out there, and they run Linux.
Yep, and we already have the ppc release for that
Or SGI’s 512 CPU Altix systems are the highest performing SSIs if you’re talking about combined raw FLOPS / OPS. And they run Linux.
MMM…
Call me ignorant if you want but, what the heck is that?
“Sun doesn’t really have very high performing servers.
If you want high performing, IBM’s 64 CPU POWER5+ systems are basically the highest performing enterprise systems out there, and they run Linux.”
Oh for crying out loud! You stupid or something? Of course there are even faster hardware available than Sun’s, but they cost about the GNP of the small country. My point was, that in that past Sun’s 8/12/24 CPU servers did not have much options when it came to operating system – no they have. Get a clue and learn how to read.
I thought the whole draw to Ubuntu was the fact that it didn’t run on ever architechture known to man?
I thought the draw was that it was more focused.
Oh well I suppose, no more paying attention to Ubuntu for me!
The Porting Team was born about a year ago, and it’s made up only by volunteers,
motivated by love for Ubuntu and uncommon hardware. Hence the criteria for
ports architectures is more about what those individuals decide than any
rational decision making process.
None of these new architectures are officially supported by the Ubuntu team.
If we can get a large enough user base, we may be able to change that.
How is this different to Debian?
ubuntu runing on sparc to run what? abiword? gnome?
Ubuntu is aimed at the desktop and the server markets.
Why not ?
I have my shiny Ultra5 on my desktop that’s currently running Debian.
It will be very good having Ubuntu on it too.
There is already a distribution that runs on every architecture plus your toaster: It’s called Debian.
I thought the point of Ubuntu was to focus on a few architectures of interest and provide timely releases. What is the point of this? The developer time would be better spent making the distribution better for the more popular architectures.
RTFA. These aren’t official Ubuntu developers doing this. They are volunteers.
So they should just take it re-wrap it and call it something else, you know, like ubuntu did debian.
Actually some of them are, Fabio Di Nitto and Lamot Jones are with the kernel team. They are doing this on their own free time.
This is unsupported by Ubuntu.
Learn to read, people!
This was also my first idea about this “change”. Ubuntu people has always preached about their differences (well, their word of use is usually more like advantages, oh well) from Debian, and how that makes them so fraggin’ better. Still, from day to day they seem to want to _be_ Debian: start from Debian, eploit about every aspect that has made Debian the favourite distro of thousands of users, sync to current Debian, now they can even tell that they support just as many acrhitectures (well, not the case this time, but this will probably change), and so on.
I don’t really care where they want to get with Ubuntu. From my point of view [of being a long time debianer and fairly knowledgeable about dozens of other distros] a _much_ bigger, let’s even say revolutionary change — and that for the better — relative to Debian itself would be needed to make me change.
That said, I always have the most recent Ubuntu on my desk, also always order fairly large amounts of disks of the newset releases from them to spread among friends and other people. Why ? Because the __only___ advantage I see in Ubuntu relative to Debian is that it’s easier to spread it among less knowledgeable people and still providing a Debian-ish feel.
no thanks. nothing other than x86, it takes to much time.
Also idiotic…
There ought to be stringent criteria though…
Like maybe, idk, 5 million users at least?
Make it worth the effort, porting to port is not useful.
It’s not your time that is spent. It’s not time wasted. It’s good for the future to keep agile and portable – both source and developer skills. It contributes to quality assurance. Linux has gained lots, having been ported to other hardware architectures.
Besides, multiplatform distros can’t be all that much extra work as the hard work is done by -others-. The kernel, X, device driver, Gnome, KDE, etc developers. And Debian itself is available for six different architectures.
What’s wrong with you people?
“What’s wrong with you people?”
They lack a life and therefore they have nothing better to do with their time than to whine endlessly on osnews about what *other* people should spend their free time on.
doesn’t work on my netra t105 (sun4u) worth a crap. doesn’t seem to read disk geometry properly. i’ll try the debian port.
RTFA. These aren’t official Ubuntu developers doing this. They are volunteers.
But then again those “volunteers” could help finishing release goals ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BreezyGoals ) if they didn’t spend their time on random architectures.
“But then again those “volunteers” could help finishing release goals”
Mayne they just dont want to? Maybe they’re more interested in porting it to a platform that they are using?
It’s their time and resources, stop telling them what to do with it.
“This is unsupported by Ubuntu. Learn to read, people!”
For now. As soon as people start whining, they’ll either have to dump the architectures or support them. You’re right, people don’t read. People will associate these architectures with Ubuntu, regardless what it says in some obscure paragraph somewhere. The previous comments prove that. It’s easy to get sucked into architecture hell.
8*
Correction: 10
And thats not including the ports to different kernels, or the beowulf port…
http://www.debian.org/ports/
Sorry, my bad. I simply counted the ISO options of my local Debian mirror and didn’t think to look further.
Now I can try it on a Sun box the place where I work has laying around…
The more diversity, the merrier. Hope it dual boots with Solaris.