Ubuntu IA64 and SPARC Ports May Vanish

Scott James Remnant announced a few minutes ago that Ubuntu developers were evaluating the state of the Ubuntu ports, and the ones that were not actively maintained would be dropped from the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) release, on October 10th, this year. "Quality is always important to Ubuntu, and nowhere more so in the ports to alternate architectures. Users using Ubuntu ports should expect the same level of quality and support that they receive from using one of the official architectures," Remnant said in the official announcement.

The ports that need a maintaining team are SPARC and IA64. While the latter is in quite a good shape, it lacks an active maintenance team. On the other hand, the SPARC port appears to be outdated, and the Ubuntu Technical Board decided to shut it off at the Feature Freeze step of Ubuntu 10.10, on August 12th, 2010.

"If Ubuntu users or developers wish this port to continue, they should group together to take over maintenance and ensure that the state is improved above the minimum level before that date. This will almost certainly require substantial work on the toolchain and kernel." Scott James Remnant continued in today's announcement.

For the Maverick Meerkat, the development team will focus their efforts on lightness and fastness! The main plans are to make Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) a lightweight and mobile operating system, bringing quality improvements to the user interface of the Netbook Edition. Another goal is to make the boot experience and web experience in Ubuntu 10.10 as lightweight and fast as possible. The development team will concentrate on making Ubuntu Netbook Edition by far the best solution for mobile computing!

Make sure that you visit our website on July 1st, when the second Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will be released, for a full coverage of the development process.