I remember not so long ago having a love hate relationship with my Ubuntu laptop distro. I loved the comely shades of brown and the cool sizzling earthy music of its start up, but it was nothing but smoke in mirrors because my crappy Acer decided to have an equally crappy wifi connection. And so the only good memory my laptop has are the lingering images of milky browns and echoing chimes. Alas that too is gone as Ubuntu partners up with Java and releases a new colour pallet of purple with their 7.04 distro.You might not see its lavender shades, but its there. Jabuntu is watching you.

Ubuntu 7.04, aka fiesty Fawn has been talke around the Linux water cooler about 3 weeks now. It is said to be the most user friendly distro ever ( well they haven’t met me and my crappy Acer have they!) This distro offers all the windows conveniences ( tools, wizards, gadgets) with the dual boot temptation. It allows an easier transition for new users……and now there is the Java aspect. Java, is nothing new, however the ability to download a complete free-of-charge Java stack is. This hole Ubuntu/Java journey started a while ago with the open sourcing and changing of distribution licensing to make it Linux useable. It has been know for a while that this merger was happening, but now we know when and we know it is purple. This promises to provide a complete headache free Java stack . One that is fully integrated and specialized for Ubuntu. No more running around and trying to find the individual components, just hassle free Jabuntu.

Does this mean our earthy little Ubuntu is all grown up and will becoming head to head with other enterprise servers that have their own application stacks? Is Red Hat now going to be in the same league with Ubuntu? Red Hat is the largest Linux distrobution and this could pose a serious challenge to them. Was this the plan?Chris Kenyon , Business Development Director with Canonical , seems to think other wise. He mentioned that while this new Linux-Java relationship gave a great product to Ubuntu users it was never the intention to compete with the heavy headers like Red Hat or Jboss. He says, ” We see the fastest-growing area of deployments of Linux servers still to be around edge-of the network stuff–file servers, print servers, Web servers–and that’s where Ubuntu as a server product is still very good.”

On a minor note, Ubuntu users should be aware that this distro does not work with ATI X1400 out of the box, which means you need to go find the drivers. Since almost all Dells use this video card, that means you have a little more running around to do after all.