Canonical announced a few days ago that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition would be available today, released at the same time with the Desktop Edition.

The 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server Edition is Canonical's fourth server release and will be supported for five years with maintenance and security updates.

Some of the most important features of Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition are:

￭ Increased kernel hardening and security with the help of AppArmor policies.
￭ A larger range of storage capabilities such as iSCSI and DRBD.
￭ Internet facing servers are protected by the integrated host firewalling.
￭ You can fully upgrade from the previous LTS edition, 6.06.
￭ Open JDK from Sun is included as an option.
￭ Freeradius (authentication), Munin (monitoring), OpenVPN and Bacula (backup) are only a few of the network infrastructure applications that made their way into Ubuntu 8.04 Server.
￭ More than 500 maintained and supported server packages, with access to over 20,000 extra components for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition.
￭ KVM was added for hosting virtualization of operating systems and applications, and the kernel got its share of improvements to optimize resources when used under virtualization.
￭ LikeWise Open provides Active Directory integration as standard.

Jane Silber, COO of Canonical Ltd., said: "Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is built for business. 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."

Lisa Sieker, vice president of Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems, added: "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."

Download Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition right now from Softpedia.