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Linux Vendors to Standardize on Single Distribution

Posted by Hemos on from the one-ring-to-bind-them dept.

Jon James writes "eWeek is reporting that a number of Linux vendors will announce on Thursday that they have agreed to standardize on a single Linux distribution to try and take on Red Hat's dominance in the industry. " The vendors in question are SuSe, Caldera, Conectiva, and Turbolinux. However, as the article also points out - Red Hat has a very well established lead in the corporate market - and Sun's decision to create Yet Another Linux Distribution (Sun Linux! Now With McNealy Vision!) will make the waters even more muddy.

7 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. Red Hat's dominance in the industry by delphi125 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Lucky for Red Hat there are no bigger OS companies around!

    1. Re:Red Hat's dominance in the industry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Clearly the battery has run low in someone's irony detector.

  2. Package Management? by loply · · Score: 3, Funny

    /Me prays its Debian inspired. Perhaps this will put more momentum behind the campaign for destroying the useless (read: Surpassed long ago) RPM standard.

    --
    loply.com
  3. To be honest... by Bnonn · · Score: 3, Funny
    ...I didn't realise Red Hat had much dominance. I'd always thought of it as the "crappy Linux distro" (which I know is unfair). I run Windows 2000 at the moment, and have been looking into which distro would be best for my needs. Essentially, Mandrake and SuSE were the two that seemed most useful. RedHat never featured.

    However, when I think about it, perhaps that makes sense; I'm looking to run a desktop (mostly), whereas I'm presuming that when Linux is used in the corporate environment it is basically only on servers.

    Is RedHat really such a good distro for corporate needs, or is it merely that it has a big name so everyone buys it? I always think of RedHat as the distro that's been around forever, even though no one seems to use it (here come the RedHat users to set me straight...) Guess I've been talking to the wrong people.

    Corporations never did make good friends to talk to though.

    1. Re:To be honest... by wadetemp · · Score: 3, Funny

      As a last addition: It is not a funny OS either. Mandrake is. Cute little penguins and round, purple install buttons.

      Cute!? The Mandrake penguin is frickin' scary. Duuubee dubee duuuu.....

  4. That's Slashdot... by HiQ · · Score: 4, Funny

    They will announce ... on thursday. But to take the pleasure out of their announcement, Slashdot pre-announces it on wednesday. There goes their 5 minutes in the spotlight. How inconsiderate!

  5. SunLinux? Bring it on! by kindbud · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'd love a Linux distro laid out like Solaris, with all the same things working as expected, and all the other things NOT working (also as expected!).

    Imagine a Linux distro with a functioning, but lamely configured SysV init, complete with run level changes that do NOTHING. Imagine a Linux distro with a SysV package system that makes it super easy to locate what file belongs to what package - so long as you are willing to write that tool (3 lines in awk, I swear!). Imagine a Linux distro with a syslogd configured out of the box to log all critical messages to the console, instead of some out-of-the-way log file. Imagine a Linux distro which included a completely broken BSD compatibility API, and plenty of warnings not to use it throughout 10 years' worth of OS documentation. Imagine a Linux distro every bit as half-assed as the one YOU would put together yourself, but with a Big Important Company's logo stuck to the box.

    Sign me up!

    --
    Edith Keeler Must Die