ARM has announced that it has made a deal with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, to create a version of Ubuntu for ARM processors that will offer the full desktop experience on low-power devices.

The initial port will be for the ARMv7 architecture which includes the Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor technology and which have already been implemented by both Texas Instruments and Qualcomm in various processor designs.

This is a huge step forward for ARM and with a more desktop like OS, it seems like ARM has taken the fight to Intel, who recently stated that ARM won't be able to compete against its Atom processors, as the full Internet runs on x86. It seems like with this announcement we'll soon see full support for the kind of features people are starting to expect to see even in fairly basic Internet devices.

We'll have to wait until April 2009 before Canonical is done porting Ubuntu, but this is less than five months away and this might not even be enough time for the device makers to come up with suitable hardware designs for the new software option.

You can find the full press release here