If you were hoping to run Ubuntu 8.04 on your
Sun UltraSPARC T2 "Niagara 2" processor, guess again. It was just two years ago that
Mark Shuttleworth announced at
JavaOne 2006 that Ubuntu would be supporting Sun's SPARC architecture starting with
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Since then, SPARC versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 have also been produced. However, Ubuntu's support of SPARC has now come to a close. The forthcoming LTS release of
Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" will arrive without any support for Sun's processors. The only officially released architectures will be for i386 and x86_64 due to a decision made by the Ubuntu Technical Board. The announcement was made on the
ubuntu-devel-announce list.