Sun Microsystems and Canonical issued a joint press release yesterday regarding Ubuntu support for the UltraSPARC T1 processor and the related Sun server line. We touched upon this topic in part one of our interview with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, late last week.

While this news was expected, based on Mark Shuttleworth’s appearance during Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote address at JavaOne earlier this month, the press release is a more official stamp of approval from Sun to Ubuntu (and vice versa).

I think this news is significant for two reasons:

1) Ubuntu is moving from the desktop to the server space - providing a community counterpoint to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). We’ve had community Linux distributions aimed at the server market since the early days of Linux, but nothing like Ubuntu, which is less than two years old and is already the number one Linux distribution (based on tracking data from DistroWatch). There’s something special about Ubuntu, and I’m still trying to understand exactly what it is.

2) Sun is serious about opportunities to sell their hardware for use with operating systems other than Solaris (or OpenSolaris derivatives). We are seeing a true decoupling of the software and hardware aspects of Sun’s business. Sun played around with Linux support in the past, but this is different.

If Canonical puts together a strong services play for Ubuntu (as is planned), you could see Ubuntu as a major player in the Linux server market over time - whether that’s coupled with hardware from Sun, or other providers. I expect to see more Ubuntu hardware partnerships from Canonical this year.