Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Canonical Ltd. today announced that Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), the upcoming release of the GNU/Linux distribution, will support the UltraSPARC T1 processor on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.

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.

O’Reilly is launching an ongoing series of PDF publications to address cutting edge technologies. Readers can purchase and download the PDFs through the O’Reilly online store, with no restrictions on the ability to save, copy, or print them.

The advantages to readers are numerous. O’Reilly authors can disseminate crucial information as the need arises, without having to wait for enough material to fill an entire book. Production time is reduced dramatically, giving IT professionals and others immediate access to the knowledge they want. Plus, readers can easily search the text, copy and paste handy bits
of code into their applications, and take the PDF with them even when they’re offline.

This month’s PDF offerings are available now:
“Build Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP” by Jim Bumgardner
“Web Services on Rails” by Kevin Marshall
“Atlas UpdatePanel Control” by Bertrand Le Roy and Matt Gibbs
“Search Engine Optimization” by Harold Davis

Other PDFs from O’Reilly can be found in the O’Reilly Store at http://pdfs.oreilly.com.

Jim Covington has written The Sun Geeks Guide To Native LDAP, covering installation and configuration of the Sun One Directory Server 5.2, Sun One Proxy Directory Server and connecting Solaris, AIX, Linux and HP-UX clients.

Abandoned but Not Forgotten has some great pictures of the current state of Sun’s original headquarters building.

FreeBSD is now self-hosting (can completely recompile/rebuild itself) on systems built around the UltraSPARC T1 processor.

You can see an example of the system boot log here.

A lot of happenings and announcements from JavaOne this week:

– Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 is now available
– The Java Studio Creator and NetBeans Enterprise Pack are now or soon will be available as open-source
– The OpenJava project will be gradually open-sourcing the Java System Portal Server 7
– Sun has released the Operating System Distributor’s License, allowing OS releases to ship with Sun’s Java
– Early Access to the Java Platform, Micro Edition is now available

Sun will be putting its Newark, California campus up for sale in June and moving the 2,300 employess who work there to its Santa Clara and Menlo Park offices.

This Sun BluePrints document (PDF) is a great overview of how Sun moved the Sun Store from 38 400Mhz UltraSPARC-II processors (spread between three E10K systems and one E6500) onto a single 8-core T2000 server, with a second identical T2000 for redundancy and backup.

I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Jonathan Schwartz (who *does* reply to personal emails), Fred Kohout, and the Niagara product and marketing teams at Sun.

FedEx dropped this off on my porch this afternoon:

(click here for more pictures)

Over the next month and a half, I’ll be doing a review and evaluation of the Sun “CoolThreads” T1000 server based on the UltraSPARC T1 multi-core/multi-thread processor running the Solaris 10 operating system.

After that review is finished (and Solaris 10 6/06 is released), this machine will be replacing the existing Enterprise 420R server that runs this website and all of the other services I provide!

If anyone knows of a nonprofit or charitable organization in Austin, Texas that could use a maxed-out E420R, please let me know as the old system will be available once the migration is complete and I now live in Houston, 150 miles away.

Thanks again to everyone at Sun who made this possible.

Sun today announced the appointment of Richard Green as executive vice president, Sun Software, reporting directly to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and chief executive officer.

Effective immediately, Green will assume responsibility for the overall operational leadership of Sun’s software division, overseeing the Solaris Enterprise System, including the Solaris Operating System, the Java Enterprise System suites, N1 management software, Sun Studio and Java Studio developer tools. In addition, he will lead a variety of industry-standards efforts and open source communities.

Sun has announced official availability its next-generation file system, ZFS.

“Solaris ZFS 1.0 will be available in June as part of the next commercial release of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet. The latest release of the Solaris 10 OS, Solaris 10 6/06, will also combine advanced Predictive Self-Healing and networking technologies with a fully-supported PostgreSQL open source database, further enhancing Solaris 10’s reputation as one of the premiere platforms for hosting high performance, mission critical database solutions.”

James Dickens’ UNIXConsult site now has a great Ultra 20 Information Page available for those of you lucky enough to own one of Sun’s Opteron-based workstations.

Sun has added RSS feeds for news and headlines as well as podcasts for news from various groups within the company. Fire up those iPods!