The announcement of Ubuntu Linux support on Sun's SPARC platform appears to be the first result of Sun's OpenSPARC initiative, which gave developers open source access to the company's chip architecture in order to widen its support among operating system and software distributors.

Sun last week said that it will support Ubuntu Linux on Sun's Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, which use the UltraSPARCT1 processor. (The hardware costs $3,000 and $7,800, respectively). This platform uses eight CPU cores on one chip, making it essentially an eight-way SMP box.

The Sun-Ubuntu alliance comes as the popular desktop Linux distribution makes its way into the enterprise data center market. Canonical, the company that packages and distributes Ubuntu, is expected to release its Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support (LTS) edition, which is aimed at server applications. Canonical says the new Sun SPARC/Ubuntu combo will be fit for running multithreaded applications or for serving high-volume Web sites.

Linux on SPARC is not exactly new. The UltraLinux project has been around for years and offers a stable, production-ready port of Linux to the 32-bit SPARC and 64-bit UltraSPARC platforms, according to the developer's Web site. Debian also offers a port for SPARC based on the UltraLinux code.

The big difference now is that Sun is officially signing off on the SPARC/Linux port, with professional-level support available for the platform. Past UltraSPARC users had only the ultralinux.org mailing list to rely on for bug fixes and technical help. It would be interesting to see how an Ubuntu-based SPARC server would fare against a SPARC box running UltraLinux - which has been around for almost 10 years, and, one would presume, has been pretty well-squeezed of bugs and glitches. If anyone out there with the resources to put these two platforms together in some kind of benchmark test, I'd be interested to hear the results.