For a community distribution, Ubuntu sure knows how to preen itself to look good for the business world. Canonical hasn't exactly kept its plans to get on IT managers' radar a secret, but the number of enterprise-ready applications for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that are slowly becoming available in the Ubuntu Partner repository is getting hard to ignore.

Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids' Linux. It's available pre-installed on PCs and laptops from Dell and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn't been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing.

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The folks from Acquia were in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld conference this week. Acquia, as we've covered before, has been working away on an array of support offerings and services for the powerful open source Drupal content management system (CMS).

A recent talk I led about community Linux and Ubuntu in the enterprise at LinuxWorld generated some discussion over at Slashdot. I can’t say that I completely agree with the headline, ‘Paid support not critical for Linux adoption.’ Well, not critical to some adoption.

In an effort to rally solutions providers around Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is telling resellers that 11 percent of U.S. businesses already run Ubuntu. That’s impressive, but when will VARs truly jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon? Here are some clues from The VAR Guy.

If you’re a managed service provider or software as a service (SaaS) specialist, here’s an interesting theory: Instead of purchasing dozens — or hundreds — of x86 servers, you’re sometimes better off virtualizing your applications on a mainframe.