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.

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...