About Ubuntu

Most x86 hardware should "just work" with Ubuntu Server Edition, However, in order to ensure to our users the best level of support when chosing their hardware, Canonical and the Ubuntu distribution team have engaged with a number of hardware vendors in order to validate specific products on the market.

Green computing with Ubuntu Terminal Services saves TCO

Ubuntu offers you an easy way to turn a desktop installation into a terminal server for your office or school to serve multiple diskless clients.

The LTSP-5 Terminal Server implementation that was developed in Ubuntu together with ltsp.org and debian, is now being adopted into most other distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuSE). With Ubuntu Terminal Services you get the most recent and reliable Terminal Server implementation currently available on the linux market.

Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04

Ubuntu Server Edition is meant to run on any Intel or AMD x86, AMD_64, EM_64T processors as well as Sun Sparc T1 processors. It requires a minimum of 128Mb of RAM and 1Gb of disk space. Depending on your needs, you might manage with less than this. However, most users risk being frustrated if they ignore these suggestions.

Ubuntu Server Edition has been verified on multiple hardware platform. More details >>

Resources and Documentation

Here are a few links to our documentation and other useful resources available about Ubuntu Server Edition:

• Documentation:

• 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron)
  

• 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

• 6.06LTS (Dapper Drake)

Debian Packages

The Debian packaging system is one of the greatest strength of Ubuntu that is directly inherited from that distribution. Not only does it provide an efficient package deployment and maintenance tools, but it is different from any other package management system in many ways.

Storage Area Network

Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04 brings the power of inexpensive shared storage to your servers. More and more organizations rely on the throughput of Ethernet Gigabit or 10 Gibabit to build up their SAN (storage area network), whether they use it for data or virtual machine storage. Using relatively inexpensive hardware, the performances can be quite amazing.

Processor Technologies

Ubuntu Server Edition is optimized for multi-core processors whether 32 or 64bits. The Kernel team is working closely with Intel and AMD to implement the latest features the processors allows, and integrate the latest drivers the chipsets permits. This includes the following technologies:

AMD

• AMD Cool'n'Quiet* & CoolCore* technology, to reduce power consumption of servers

• AMD HyperTransport* technology, reducing latency and increasing throughput on RAM access

System Requirements

The minimum memory requirement for Ubuntu 8.04 is 384MB of memory for desktop CDs, and 256MB for other installation methods. (Note that some of your system's memory may be unavailable due to being used for the graphics card.)

Virtualization

Ubuntu Server Edition offers a great variety of virtualization technologies, whether it is used as a host or a guest operating system. From free to non-free solutions, Ubuntu offers choices to match every need. We acknoledge that not any single tool offers all the options to fit all needs and while we are strongly commited with KVM as our maintained open source option, VMware and Parallels' OpenVz offer choices for use cases that KVM does not account for in the server space.