SPARC and Itanium support discontinued in Ubuntu 10.10

Ubuntu 10.10 will not be ported to the Itanium and SPARC platforms.

The future version of the popular Linux distribution, (code-named Maverick Meerkat), will no longer have support for either the SPARC or the Itanium platforms.

The ports of both Itanium and SPARC have been killed, because no one has put themselves forward for the job of maintaining them, according to a posting by James Remnant of Canonical on the Ubuntu technical board.

But version 10.04 of Ubuntu - Lucid Lynx - has support for both Itanium and SPARC. The LTS (long term support) version of the distribution will have ongoing support for the platforms for three years for desktops and five years for servers.