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.

Comments

LSB

[rmstar]

If somebody is wondering what LSB is, well no, its not the pre-precursor of LSD; it is the Linux Standard Base

cheers

rmstar

Re:Package Management?

[ZaMoose]

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.

Re:More RPMs for more things more timely?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

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.

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 ./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.

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.

Linux

[hdparm]

It has become obvious that Linux is ready for big game. When big game is on, rules are different, players are tougher, stakes are bigger and, suddenly, Linux is much more than fun. People from said 4 companies have realised this but probably too late to make any serious damage to Red Hat, not to mention other players in this game.

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.

Re:They should *all* be co-operating

[Salsaman]

"The Linux community is notorious for thumbing their noses at standards."

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.

Re:To be honest...

[irix]

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.

Re:Red Hat's dominance in the industry

[MrResistor]

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...