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Linux Vendors to Standardize on Single Distribution
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.
> I'm all for competition, but it seems to me that we've already dealt with this particular issue.
This is a very North American way of looking at the Linux marked. Fortunately, the rest of the world have another view of the Linux marked.
If somebody is wondering what LSB is, well no, its not the pre-precursor of LSD; it is the Linux Standard Base
cheers
rmstar
If you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, and don't mind compiling stuff, you should give Source Mage or Gentoo a gander. Both are "source-based" distros, meaning their packaging systems have been designed to automate the download-compile-install procedure. The result are packages that are compiled against the libraries already on your system (read: no subtle binary compatability issues between library versions, etc. as crop up with binary distros from time to time, and is the reason redhat RPMs often don't work with Suse and visa versa), and which are optimized for your hardware. Systems so constructed are typically 20-30% faster (based on anecdotal benchmarks people on the mailing lists have run. It matches my own experience
cons:
* installation takes time
- time to download sourcecode packages
- time to compile said packages
* you have to get your hands dirty
- no easy X config a la Mandrake/Suse/RH
- no hardware autodetection a la Mandrake
pros:
* stable, rock solid system
* fast, optimized system
* very current versions of the software
* ability to keep current fairly easilly (no waiting for months, perhaps even a year, before getting the current version of xfree or KDE)
* utter flexibility as to what you choose to include or exclude from your installation
* package system takes most of the pain out of compiling and installing packages by hand
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Since when was the debian packaging system based on RPM? It may be similar to RPM, but it isn't RPM.
And as for De Facto standards, one only has to look at IBM and Microsoft and the state the computer industry is in today. Fair competition is the Best Way(TM) to keep the market in check. We wouldn't want Red Hat to become the M$ of the Linux and UNIX world, now,would we?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Good point. But, TurboLinux, which lagged in producing a GUI installer for its distribution, now has the most logical and easy to use GUI installer. Doubt it? Give it a try, it's pretty cool. Too bad the finished product leaves much to be desired.
The point really, is this: Each of these four, with perhaps the exception of Caldera, has some areas in which it excels. And, even Caldera forms the base for Lycoris, which seems to be the darling of many a reviewer, these days. It would be really nice to see them pick and choose to build a better mousetrap... or Linux distro...
However, even if they do build a better distro, there's something else worthwhile to point out: Except possibly for Connectiva, this group has a less than stellar devotion to free software. Check out some of Ransom Love's quotes on the matter. Although Red Hat has strayed from LSB and has made some less-than-gracious efforts to protect its brand name, it has never backed off from making its software free or freely available. ("Now, where did I put my "Live Evaluation" copy of SuSE? I need to get some work done...") Personally, for this reason, I can endorse (with appropriate caveats) Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, or Slackware (or countless minor distros), but none from this group. Maybe this will change things...
You do realize that there is APT for RPM, don't you? Connectiva ported it, so maybe there's a chance that this MegaDistro will be apt-rpm based.
It works like a charm, esp. if you use the FreshRPMS repositories.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Unfortunately, once you start looking at installing stuff that *didn't* come with the distro, it gets ver ugly very fast. Apparently, they've got a non-standard layout that many ./configure scripts choke on.
./configure scripts don't work, it's because they were created with some kind of dependency on a nonstandard (non LSB) platform such as RedHat.
SuSE follows the Linux Standard Base (LSB) specification, which is an impartial specification that outlines where certain binaries and libraries should be put. If the
Granted, automake and autoconf really shouldn't be subject to this. The only other explanation is that the libraries aren't misplaced, they are missing (not installed). Personally I've never had a problem compiling stuff on SuSE. mplayer, xine, gnupg, and gaim all compiled without much ado.
No, Mandrake was originally based on the RedHat distribution. It's claim to fame was that they took the basic RedHat distro (386 optimized) and recompiled it to 586 optimization. It will only run on Pentiums and higher. The installer is definately different, but the base - where things are located, RPMs, the configure scripts - are all based on RedHat
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If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
I heard about this a few weeks ago from a friend within one of these companies, who also asked me not to post it until it was announced (ahem!)
Apparently, the initiative has come from IBM here, they're going to call in Universal Business Linux (UBL - quite unfortunate) Word is that SuSE will produce the distro for the other three companies, although at the time, Connectiva weren't in on it.
Basically, what's in it for IBM is this: It reduces the number of distros they have to support to two: Red Hat and UBL
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Mandrake is in fact based on RedHat. You should not be so quick to call someone a liar just because you did not know this information.
Mandrake and RedHat may have different installation methods but Mandrake was originally based on RedHat but optimised for Pentium processors. I would guess that the original founders of Mandrake took a RedHat distro and changed/improved upon a significant number of things and called it "Mandrake".
SuSE changed their policy on free iso downloads some time ago, around 7.0 I think.
You can download the individual packages (all 6 gigs of it) or you can download the 'live' evaluation iso, but not the actual installation iso's.
To me it seems fair enough, they have to pay their rent like anyone else and bandwidth ain't free.
No doubt these guys have technical expertise comparable to Red Hat's. Product, even combined one, is also similar, based on the same components. And that's it. Not enough for a big game - can't be won on technical merrits alone.
Red Hat is different. They (well, Bob Young may be more accurate) figured this long time ago and have been building the brand name, portfolio of products and services and awesome team of people. Red Hat now has all that. Their product kicks ass from Wall St. all the way down to my laptop, they've got name recognized all over the world, second ranked Linux authority and many more of the finest developers work for them, Red Hat's support is top of the shelf, their training program is ranked 1st in the world, their cash account is very healthy and they are still one of the greatest OSS contributors.
Oh yes, almost forgot - they're some 7 years ahead.
Hats down to them.
Fuck all of you. If you pretentious fucks are as goddamned open-minded as you all think you are, then drop the fucking group-think and at least listen to some different ideas.
You are correct, but only for proprietary standards. Open standards are generally gladly welcomed by the Linux community.
The Linux Standard Base is becoming more and more popular with distributions, since following the guidelines means that a package created for one distribution should install and work smoothly on all compliant distros. All Linux distributions will eventually have to follow the LSB recommendations, or risk not being compatible with commonly released packages, and losing their user base.
I think the LSB's work is a Good Thing all round both for the distributors and for end users and developers.
I use various Linux Distros at home (Debian, RedHat, Mandrake) on several machines and I enjoy hacking around with them. Not to mention Free/OpenBSD.
However, here at work, I need to get stuff done, and not spend my whole day playing with by setup. I have been using RedHat + Ximain Gnome. The system is stable and easy to keep up to date, and it Just Works(TM).
As more people start using Linux at work, you'll see more of this. That is why RedHat is getting popular.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
they take a loss on every ISO download? SuSE would probably have more market share if they gave away their YaST2 enabled distribution, but it's not in their business plan.
That's why SuSE Pro is $80 and Red Hat Pro is $200. To be fair, though, SuSE does give their distro away for free, just not as ISOs. Anyone can install it over FTP, and they provide instructions for doing so on their website. IIRC, it was also an option on the boot disk install menu (my Mother-in-Law's computer mourns the demise of the boot disk in 8.0), at least from 6.3 to 7.2.
I haven't tried it, so I don't know how easy/difficult it really is, but it's an available option, and certainly a viable one for anyone who has the bandwidth to download ISOs, especially since (at least in theory) you'd only be downloading the packages you were actually installing. There's certainly nothing stopping anyone from simply burning their FTP directories to CD. Hell, they even let you mount their FTP directory as an NFS partition if that floats your boat...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Gentoo has been great on my home systems... I feel as though I've seen a nice speed difference after installing it... Got the desktop up in a flash... Apache... Postfix... Samba... etc... Run the command, it installs them then tweak the config files... All pretty easy to me... I do agree however that there has been problems with packages being released for installation that have broken things... The libpng issue a few weeks back caused me to have to recompile alot of my packages... But it is all a learning experience... I see Gentoo being one of the big boys for a long time to come...
/etc/init.d/ and rc-update add Program/Service default to put it into the startup scripts. Let's me remain ignorant AND lazy, wahoo!
Points I like about it:
Portage - run a command and it will download, compile, and install the program/updates you specify...
rc Scripts - I was lazy and never did sit down to work out how rc.d / rc.1 / rc.2 / rc.3 / etc worked... With Gentoo you just goto
Installation - all command line based you do everything by hand... I like it... The install doc is easy enough to follow... The base iso is 16mb after that you can sit and see what packages are being installed, you don't have a huge bundle or programs you don't need... After installation I can sit and add what I want...
WebSite/Docs - I've been back to their website many times looking at their docs for how to get things up and going... Really not bad at all... Got my desktop system up and going no problem. It is great to finally have the NVidia drivers installed and working proper (Tux Racer wahoo)... Plus configuring Postfix, Apache, Webmail, Security, etc... Nifty stuff... I'm sure the info will grow as things move along...
That's about all I can think of for now... I have three of my boxes converted already, gonna keep rolling with it...
Woody2143
(website is down to due horrible lack of content)
Blah.