SPARC, IA64 Ports Of Ubuntu Face Decommissioning

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SPARC, IA64 Ports Of Ubuntu Face Decommissioning

While Ubuntu and its derivatives (such as Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Netbook) are most popular on x86 and x86_64 systems along with a growing presence on ARM-based devices, ports of Ubuntu have been available for SPARC and IA64 architectures too. However, as the quality of these ports have been degrading, the IA64 and SPARC ports of Ubuntu Linux may be decommissioned during the Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" development cycle...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODMyNQ

[cb88]

Sad... The SPARC port has degraded probably because sun was stupid enough to discontinue their workstation line. Where a lot of the porting and maintainance was likely done.

[Svartalf]

Indeed. There's still some promise within the SPARC line as an architecture- but if you can't lay your hands on usable machines to maintain or even USE the SPARC version of Ubuntu,...

[Chad Page]

Sadly I'm not surprised - the world is prolly going to be amd64, arm, and everything else, in that order. (although MIPS might be big in a few years if the Chinese chips become 'good enough', thinking about it...)

[ethana2]

As long as I've still got my PowerPC port, I'm good.

Ubuntu is targeting the *desktop*. Very few of us G4 and G5 users, but we are out there. Sparc and IA64? Mmmhhhh, dunno.

[movieman]

Sad... The SPARC port has degraded probably because sun was stupid enough to discontinue their workstation line.

Much as I liked my old SPARC machines, building a SPARC workstation which can compete against a $1000 PC running Linux (or OpenSolaris) is a tough job.... SPARC is much more competitive in the server market.

As for IA64, I didn't even realise they still existed .

[frostwarrior]

That's fine. Debian is still out there supporting the most exotics cheese graters.

And for the other side, SPARC and IA64 are strong cpus, enough for making his own gentoo build in a blink of an eye

[frostwarrior]

Canonical needs to change some of his ways to make ubuntu in order to, at least, think about entering in the twilight zone of non-x86 servers.

[movieman]

Canonical needs to change some of his ways to make ubuntu in order to, at least, think about entering in the twilight zone of non-x86 servers.

I'm not so sure: Ubuntu isn't really a player in the 'serious' server market which might have SPARC or IA64 CPUs instead of x86... I have it on my MYthTV/NFS server box at home but it changes too much too fast for me to risk it on a server that does real work.

[glasen]

IA-64 aka Itanium is dead and for SPARC-based systems Solaris is a much better choice.

And even SPARC is nearing the grave. New workstations with SPARC-CPUs are non-existent today. The last SPARC-based workstation was built by SUN in 2008. And on servers x86-CPUs offer a much better performance/price-ratio than SPARC-based systems.

So why should Canonical still support this CPUs?