After a weekend’s debugging work, David Miller now has booted Ubuntu Linux on Sun Microsystems’ UltraSparc T1 “Niagara”-based server.
The Red Hat programmer’s earlier Linux version suffered from a serious error called a kernel panic in the first Linux-Niagara boot attempt. But he hammered out the bugs, Miller said Tuesday in his blog.
Sun Microsystems fulfilled a pledge Tuesday to release UltraSparc chip details in an effort to make it easier to bring Linux and versions of BSD Unix to its systems.
In addition, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company will use the General Public License (GPL) to govern the release of the chip design itself.
“Open source is not just about software. Freedom is not just about software. It’s going to come to hardware, and we’re going to drive that,” Schwartz said in a speech at the Open Source Business Conference here.
OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for editing text, as well as creating spreadsheets and drawings. Sun acquired the product in 1999 and released the source code in 2000 under an open-source license. Sun uses the OpenOffice code as the foundation of StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite.
OpenOffice.org wants Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) to give up control over the OpenOffice open-source productivity suite and donate the intellectual property to an independent, not-for-profit foundation.
“In an ideal world, open source should not be dependent upon the capriciousness of any one corporation,” OpenOffice.org project leader Louis Suarez-Potts said.
“A foundation doesn’t isolate a project from any one corporation, it provides some distance.”
“The realitiy is that [a foundation] requires Sun to give up the intellectual property to a foundation. That’s a fairly large obstacle,” he added.
The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 “Niagara” chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength.
But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence.
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