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Ubuntu 7.04, aka ‘Feisty Fawn’ was released today, and it looks like interest in the new release is once again greater than the last. Ubuntu’s Drupal powered site unfortunately bit-the-big-one for several hours today (or as Mark Shuttleworth was quoted in the linked article, became ‘logjammed’).

Hopefully the loss of liveliness was network related, and not related to some Drupal scalability issue; one may never know :)

This new release of Ubuntu is exciting for Java developers, as “This is the first time the Java platform technology has been fully integrated into a Linux distribution to this extent (from article)”. What that means for most is that Sun’s entire stack of newly-licensed software (Glassfish, the JDK, Netbeans) is all available in the Ubuntu repositories for immediate, and seamless installation.

For those of us that aren’t Netbeans fans, Eclipse is still being updated quite regularly for Ubuntu. I actually install my own Eclipse in Ubuntu because I prefer to have access to milestone releases and other fresh-off-the-boat changes - but it’s still a very nice thing to have such tight integration with the straight-from-the-source JDK.

It’s promising to see Java become such a predominant feature on Ubuntu so quickly in the recent months; Linux developers have veered away of Java for so long because of the licensing issues, and it’s always felt very dirty to me that one of the most popular languages for new Linux applications is Mono.

I’m hopeful that the combination of promise of platform fidelity from SWT, the cross-platform promise from Java, and the ease of installation of the libraries thanks to Ubuntu and others will soon bring Java to the desktop forefront on Linux; the jury is still out, I suppose.