Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition Combines Advanced Functionality With Five Years of Maintenance and Support

LONDON, April 21, 2008 - Canonical Ltd. announced the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition for free download on Thursday 24 April. In related news, Canonical also announced the simultaneous release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition.

Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition adds new features to enhance the performance, stability and security of this fully supported general platform. The LTS release sees further expansion of the commercial ecosystem of software, hardware and services vendors supporting Ubuntu Server.

The extended maintenance period meets demand from business users to deploy Ubuntu widely over a period of years. It also positions Ubuntu Server as a platform on which hardware and software vendors can build commercial solutions. A wide range of vendors have declared support for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and more are currently testing and certifying the release.

“Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is built for business,” said Jane Silber, COO of Canonical Ltd. “This release brings together significant feature and stability improvements to a free and open platform. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is at the centre of a growing ecosystem of applications that serve businesses of all sizes extremely well. We look forward to seeing its adoption grow across the five years we will support it."

As part of its news today, Canonical also announced that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is certified on several high performance, energy efficient Sun x64 server platforms, including the Sun Fire X2100 M2, X2200 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers. Lisa Sieker, vice president of Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems says, "Sun is committed to providing customers a choice of operating systems on our x64 servers. Sun has worked closely with Canonical since early 2006 and we continue to see growing interest in Ubuntu on Sun platforms.”

About Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is the fourth server release from Canonical. It comes with five years of security updates and maintenance. Among the new and updated features available with the LTS release are:

Solid Foundation

• Expanded range of network infrastructure applications including authentication (FreeRadius), monitoring (Munin), VPN (OpenVPN) and backup (Bacula).

• Enhanced security with integrated AppArmor policies and increased kernel hardening.

• Increased range of storage capabilities including iSCSI and DRBD.

• Over 500 maintained and supported server packages, together with access to more than 20,000 additional components built for 8.04 LTS.

• Integrated host firewalling to protect Internet facing servers.

• Fully upgradable from the previous 6.06 LTS release.

Extensive Ecosystem

• Active Directory integration as standard, provided by LikeWise Open.

• Ubuntu is the first distribution to include Open JDK from Sun as an option.

• Certified applications for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition from Alfresco, Bacula, IBM, VMWare, Parallels, Qumranet, Tresys, Zarafa, Zend, Zimbra and more.

Virtual Platform of Choice

• Addition of KVM for hosting virtualisation of applications and operating systems.

• Significant kernel improvements to optimise resources use when under virtualisation.

• Ubuntu JeOS enhanced to optimise virtual appliances and ready to run in VMWare or KVM environments on any system.