The Ubuntu's GNU/Linux distribution has seen its popularity rise, as illustrated by its inclusion in some Dell products and in Sun's plans. Another sign of its popularity is the launch of WorksWithU, a website covering Ubuntu's evolution and usages for multiple audiences, including small businesses and large enterprises.

Ubuntu's latest release, dubbed Hardy Heron, has been announced today, providing both a desktop and a server edition. A feature overview is available online, but the most important point of this release is certainly its long term support: 3 years for the desktop edition, and 5 years for the server edition.

Ubuntu announced the availability of Ubuntu JEOS (for Just Enough Operating System), specifically design to provide a minimal base operating system, hence reducing maintenance complexity, to be used in virtual appliances, ie images to be run on virtualisation technologies as Xen or VMWare. It is available for download, but currently only in 32 bits flavour.

Today is the release date for Ubuntu 7.10, also known as Gutsy Gibbon. It is not a Long Term Support (LTS) release, that will come in april 2008. But this release includes new features so they can be stabilised for the april LTS release, such as for example a tickless kernel, improving power savings and virtualisation capabilities, read/write support for NTFS partitions, and 3D graphics on the desktop.

The final release is not yet available at the time of posting, but expect it to appear later today on their download servers.

Dell computers with Ubuntu pre-installed are now also available in Europe (UK,France and Germany). You can expect a default Ubuntu installed, with device drivers installed, but no proprietary codecs. Dell also has agreements with Novell and Redhat. They also built a JBOSS based solution with Redhat.