DB2 validated for use on Ubuntu

Good news for all you DB2 for Linux people who love Ubuntu -- IBM just validated Ubuntu as a Linux distribution on which IBM is willing to offer its enterprise level support. You can see that Ubuntu was excited in their press release about the accomplishment. And rightully so: no other database server has announced production-level support for Ubuntu. Cool.

I've issued some updates to the DB2 for Linux HOWTO that will hopefully be published soon; I had based the original Ubuntu install instructions on my Gentoo experiences and there were a few embarassing references to that that I hadn't cleaned up (and which were painfully evident now that I'm running Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" on the dual-boot side of my laptop).

In a future update to the HOWTO, I plan to offer a little more fine-grained installation advice; the current instructions install everything under the sun, including support for 29 different languages, warehouse agents, and assorted other features that probably aren't required for most developers or users. But at least you can get up and running relatively easily

So if you want to try Ubuntu, go to http://ubuntulinux.org. It has replaced SuSE Workstation 9.2 on my laptop -- and I'm even using Gnome again, which I had given up on a few years ago.

If you want to try DB2, you can download a 90-day trial of DB2 Express.