How Is Ubuntu Doing as a Server Platform?
Canonical jumped into the Unix distribution business in October 2004 and got into Linux server distribution in June 2006. With the launch last week of Ubuntu 7.10 for desktops and servers last week and the upcoming launch in April 2008 of a new Long Term Support variant of Ubuntu, it is reasonable to stop for a second and try to assess how well or poorly Ubuntu is doing on servers.
One of the first problems in trying to figure out how Ubuntu is doing on servers is that Canonical and the Ubuntu project that it controls has no concrete numbers on how many Ubuntu distributions are out there in use. Depending on when you ask, the Ubuntu installed base is anywhere from 6 million to 8 million--the larger number was an estimate from last year made by Canonical, and the latter and smaller number is the most recent estimate. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's founder, was pressed during the Ubuntu 7.10 for a more precise accounting of the number of server installs, but said that it was not possible given that the Ubuntu project does not require registration for either desktop or server variants of its Linux, nor does it put any tracking software into its installs. Canonical does, of course, know exactly how many Ubuntu licenses are under support, and it is obviously a lot smaller than the millions of licenses that have been distributed in the past three years. And Shuttleworth was not going to divulge these numbers, just like other Linux distributors do not and Sun Microsystems does not with its Solaris 10 variant of Unix, which is freely distributed and open source as well.
The evidence on how Ubuntu is doing on servers is largely anecdotal at this point.
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re: Ubuntu Server
Give me a break.
Unoobtu - the distro that assumes you're too stupid to figure out how to safely use the root account "thinks" anybody would use that POS as a production server?
Dream on.
lmao
re: ubuntu server
some guy blogged the other day about his ubuntu server crashing about everyday until he figured out that ubuntu was running /var/run in ramdisk. mysql was filling up the ramdisk and the server would crash due to being out of memory until he figured out the problem and now runs /var/run from harddrive.