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Batten down the hatches, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due in TWO DAYS

Admins dab straining server brows in advance of Trusty Tahr's long-term support landing

Canonical has announced that the latest long-term support release of its Ubuntu Linux distribution will be available in two days.

The Linux company made the availability announcement of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, codenamed "Trusty Tahr" on Tuesday, coincidentally alongside chief rival Red Hat holding its Red Hat Summit in San Francisco.

We've already covered the main desktop features elsewhere, and suffice it to say that our reviewer was encouraged by the changes.

As for the server features where Canonical is keen to gain influence against well-funded rival Red Hat, Ubuntu 14.04 wraps in new features such as support for the "Icehouse" OpenStack release, containerization technology Docker, and ARM-64 chips.

"We're seeing OpenStack more than anything," explained Ubuntu server and cloud product manager Mark Baker in a chat with El Reg.

The company has also upgraded its "Metal-as-a-Service" deployment technology to add support for some further dense servers, such as AMD-SeaMicro's SM1500 and gear from Cisco's UCS division.

There's also a series of incremental upgrades such as moving to support version 3 of the Puppet config management software, upgrading the Xen hypervisor to 4.4, moving to support for version 0.79 of the Ceph object storage gear, and supporting version 1.0 of LXC.

Database admins may be relieved to hear that Ubuntu is offering choice here, and is wrapping in support for MySQL 5.5 along with MariaDB 5.5, Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5, and MySQL 5.6 into its distro.

Non-x86 chip fiddlers are in for a surprise as well, with Ubuntu 14.04 supporting IBM's POWER8 servers along with 64-bit ARM chips from Applied Micro.

"Ubuntu is now the enterprise platform supported on the widest range of modern architectures – IBM POWER, ARM64, x86, and x64," the company crowed in its press release. ®

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