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United Linux is Here
pstreck writes "Red Hat watch out! Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux have made good on their promise and United Linux is here! According to their website 'United Linux is a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. It is developed, marketed and sold by an experienced partnership of Linux companies.'"
I just don't get it I guess, it just seems like there are already so many standards.
Taken from their FAQ:
Will UnitedLinux break existing compatibility with hardware and software?
Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, and Turbolinux will collaborate on the development of the UnitedLinux distribution in order to provide migration pathes from their former releases to UnitedLinux. However, each UnitedLinux partner will still have its own Linux distribution that is "Powered by UnitedLinux." Existing long-term relationships with leading hardware and software companies - as well as the current UnitedLinux partners - guarantee the compatibility of UnitedLinux with relevant business solutions. HW and SW manufacturers have the opportunity to join the alpha and beta test circles, thus reassuring in an early stage that UnitedLinux supports their products.
This is the closest thing I could find on the site that states how they plan to provide a "united" linux and still have seperate distributions. My first question is though, "why don't I see anything mentioned about the Linux Standard Base?" If United Linux doesn't support the LSB, then the LSB may never take off. The Linux community may miss a real chance at providing a true standard. Also interesting is the part of the FAQ that invites Red Hat and Mandrake to be part of the United Linux party. I wonder how many other distros will join in on this?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
In my opinion, so long as Redhat stays focused and continues catering to big business, I don't see them losing ground to this team.
I may be one of the few on this side, but I won't be trading in my Redhat CDs for United Linux for quite a while. I've been using Redhat for a couple years now, and for the most part, I'm a happy customer. It would take either a HUGE advance on someone elses part, or a big nose dive on Redhat's part to get me to switch.
Ok how 'bout another one of those conspiracy theories?
This is an attack on DEBIAN!!!
No ok bear with me a minute.... Lets see if a big company currently needed to have a product working on linux what would they do? They could either get it to be certified against RedHat since that is the most widely used and known linux distro. Or they could get it certified on most of the major platforms. This still poses the problem that when they there are a lot of distros that are not the major distros and so then it's confusing for the end users.
So they see Debian. An independently developed, high quality, standards based distro. Cool they say. Lets standardise on Debian. No single company controls it. And it's pretty high quality and standards compliant. Lets certify it against that and then the other distros, once they are standards compliant as well (ala LSB), we're all set. We had an announcement from HP recently with something similar in it's content. And no doubt had UL not reared it's head, we would have seen more.
So now the big Linux corps are in a quandry. Except RedHat of course. Since they are still the defacto Linux distro. They see this standardisation being done around a development that is outside of their control and will never be in their control. They've got to do something about it. HELLO UNITED LINUX.
Well in any case thats my $.02
BTW did anyone notice the FAQ that asks "Will I be able to download UL for free **for non-commercial use**". I thought a downloadable version of Linux would be available for any use whatsoever that the downloader desiers?
cheers
AC
Unfortunately for SuSe, Caldera, et. al, the standard most businesses are choosing is Red Hat.
If a business is going to offer a linux version of an existing product, it needs a stable, recognized, widely-used Linux platform to develop for. Writing the code to be Linux-compliant distributed source based on glibc version x, Gnome version Y, places the onus of getting the code running on either the end user or the distribution. This won't cut it in the business world, where you're expected to deliver a binary that had damned well better run once it's installed or the customer will take their business somewhere else.
More and more often, the "standard" that businesses are developing for is Red Hat. This could have the eventual effect of shutting the other players out of the enterprise platform, which, as any of them will tell you, is where most of the money is.
In order to provide a competing stable platform for enterprises to develop for (and
buy software for), the aformetioned companies all threw their weight behind one joint enterprise-ready Linux platform.
Will it work? I don't know. I wish them luck, though. I have no ill-will toward Red Hat as I consider them one of the "good guys", but I'd hate to see them (or any one other distro) dominate the market.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Hey,
I just wanted to congratulate them and to write them some wishes. When clicking on 'contact' on the unitedlinux-website, there are four adresses.
The mail to unitedlinux@suse.com seems to have reached the support: I recieved a support-ticket number. Hmmm...
The mail to unitedlinux@caldera.com was replied automatically too, but without subject or sender. It said "I will be out of the office traveling between May 28 - June 9. I will be checking e-mail[...]"
The mail to unitedlinux@turbolinux.com did not reach anybody: "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender"
Should I laugh or should I cry...?
Unless this new distribution offers something significantly better than what Red Hat already does--and it looks to me like it doesn't--then this means nothing. A large part of the business world is still uneasy about migrating to Linux; those who do decide to use it will undoubtedly pick a well-established name like Red Hat over a consortium of distributions with much weaker market presence.
It's easy to take something, go your own way with it, then when it's sufficiently advanced and distinguished, call it your own standard.
The thing is, you can call it standard all you want, doesn't make it any more a true standard.
You need to build mindshare with all of your users, clients, etc., get some partners to help you along and support Your Way(tm).
That part looks good for these United Linux folks.
I still prefer The Debian Way, though, and I doubt they will be able to change that.
However, it will be good to have an alternative to Red Hat in the minds of the Common Folk.
This just sounds like LSB with really good internationalization support. I might be glossing over some important things here, and if I am, please, someone tell me, but that sounds like that's all there is to it. Oh, yeah, and they enforce the use of KDE 3, which means I'm not interested, thanks. I guess I can see why they're picking just one desktop; it would seem to make sense, but I just can't stand KDE. ;) (could Kontrol-center get just a FEW MORE USELESS PREFS?!!?)
:) On the other side of things, there's United Linux, Mandrake, Lycoris. and Lindows... that pits some serious muscle against some serious muscle. While I'm rooting for GNOME, I'm excited no matter what the outcome, because it can only mean a better desktop for all users!
I'm really glad they're pushing for LSB compliance, but RH has promised they will be releasing a LSB 1.1 compliant distro this year. Since 7.3 isn't it, that means it'll have to be what will undoubtably be called RH 8.0 and will probably be released this Fall/early Winter, at least based on their past release patterns.
As an aside, the GNOME/KDE thing is about to get very interesting... GNOME 2 is like a couple weeks from release, and it's going to be the default desktop for Solaris, HP-UX, and (of course) Red Hat. All of these are major "enterprise" players. (I wouldn't be *too* surprised to see AIX follow suit.... any IBM people care to comment? Heh... CAN you?
The Free desktop that Just Works
Why is Acrobat Reader listed among the main components?!! First, AFAIK, Acrobat Reader is only "Free Beer"-software. Second, what makes it so importand that it has to be listed as a "main component"?! I don't get it...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The trouble with de facto standards is that no-one can be held accountable for not adhering to them. Debian uses a non-standard cramfs initial ramdisk by default, it doesn't include a gawk-awk softlink (or didn't, the last time I checked), yet Debian is one of the top three Linux distributions. I would never rate it that highly but I'm only a software developer. The users are the ones who decide which distribution wins and which one loses, and thus which de facto standards should stay and which should go.
The fact is, software developers can code to anyset of standards, so long as it sits still long enough. Moving targets are very hard to hit. If the distros sit still, the software devlopers will have an easier time but the act of sitting still might cost the distributions some users.
If the distributions would get together and write an API to let software developers figure out more easily where everything is, rather than expect the developers to customize their apps every time to make allowances for all those eccentricities, it would be enough, IMO. If Debian, Red Hat and SuSE would sit down at a table and hammer out the format of /etc/my-b0rken-distro.conf, I would have far less trouble on my hands on a daily basis.
Interesting to see KDE mentioned, but not Gnome. Not meaning to start a flamewar here. Well, okay, I am.. . >:-)
IMHO, it is mainly a move to save the costs of maintaining 4 different distributions. Let Connectiva do South America, SuSE Europe (they are big here!), Turbolinux Asia and Caldera North America.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Unfortunately for SuSe, Caldera, et. al, the standard most businesses are choosing is Red Hat.
I think this could change quite easily. We're still in the early stages of the uptake of Linux. It's only got to take one of the big players (HP, IBM, Dell...) to decide to give more support to UnitedLinux than to RedHat for all this to change.
Look at the companies that are supporting United Linux. IBM especially likes to see lots of competition between its suppliers. United Linux is a way for then to have that competition and at the same time have all the linux suppliers producing a technically consistent product.
The problem is that RedHat is none of the above. Each .1 upgrade introduces new, beta code that breaks something. Look at a the product support matrix for Oracle on Linux - every new version of Red Hat takes months to be certifed for support and the older versions are dropped from support as soon as the newest is available. On the other hand, SuSE usually isn't on the cutting edge and their distributions are based on mature, stable code - just what businesses are looking for.
Also interstingly enough, SuSE 8.0 was fully LSB compliant, the first commercial distro to be so.
My guess is that the base OS will be SuSE. Who's management tools they decide to go with is still anyone's guess. Maybe it'll be a whole new set entirely.
Notice on their FAQ there's a question that says: "Will users be able to download free versions of UnitedLinux for non-commercial uses, similar to how Linux is freely available today?" And of course the answer is yes.
What bugs me here is their implicit use of the phrase "for non-commercial uses". As far as I know, "how Linux is freely available today" is free as in Free. You can use the distros for any purpose you see fit, including making millions, for free. You only pay if you want fancy CDs, manuals, support contracts, tech support, etc.
Is this just a bad choice of wording, or does this mean they'll try to impose some licensing or distribution scheme aimed at making "free" only apply to non-commercial use?
11*43+456^2
I've just read the United Linux FAQ.
It's obviously written by a marketing person who hasn't read the Cluetrain Manifesto. The answers all read like ``United Linux is wonderful, the sun shines out of it's arse''.
There is no discussion of questions that no doubt will be frequently answered, such as:
UnitedLinux seems to finger the enterprise for its customers but fails to clarify which markets.
Is this effort targeted at the server market or the desktop market?
Since, they seem to finger Redhat I would assume the server markets?
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Each of these companies has done a lot of interesting stuff. I want to know which parts of each distro is going to go into United Linux. My biggest gripes with RedHat is lack of XFS support and painful upgrade routes. I think United Linux will have a chance in hell if...
1. They adopt apt-rpm as a layer in their installation and upgrade process.
2. They include advanced features like XFS and ACLs from the base installer.
3. They keep YAST.
4. They support up and coming platforms, like ia64.
5. They make it easy for third parties to add proprietary features to their distro.
- a kernel recompile
- a buncha utilites (at least two different packages)
- a specialized login script somewhere
- changes to the GUI login
This shouldn't be hard, but (long story short) it's never worked for me.I could really use a more automated, standardized setup for this that would be suited for an office-wide implementation. Especially desired would be a way to send Linux-useable login scripts from Novell NDS Administrator. I wish Novell would lift a helpful finger too. It may be pragmatic to support hardly anything outside Windows, but I would imagine their experiences with Microsoft would drive them to support other desktop options.
This feature would earn UnitedLinux my heart. Currently I'm Red Hat at the office, Mandrake & SlackWare (tho I'm not smart enough for SlackWare) at home.
I'll bet it works great with IE, though.
I'm glad to see that crucial pillar of an operating system, Acrobat Reader getting a mention right next to the kernel, gcc, XFree86, etc.
Main components:
* Kernel 2.4.18 or higher
* glibc 2.2.5
* gcc 3.1
* XFree86 4.2
* KDE 3.0
* Acrobat Reader
Lol...
Get your own free personal location tracker
From their FAQ:
Will users be able to download free versions of UnitedLinux for non-commercial uses, similar to how Linux is freely available today?
Yes, UnitedLinux sources will be made available for free download as soon as version 1 is released.
I think there is danger in this message, something that came from the dark side of the force:
Download free versions: means that will be some non-free version
For non-comercial: means that comercial user will have to pay (looks like M$ stuff)
Similar to how linux is available: means that will not be like linux, but similar, no GPL? not free software? is like M$ closed stuff?
So, people, as this messages continue on their WEB SITE, as they are not GPL and because they want to earn money over their copy's, let's stick with red hat, mandrake and debian!
let them burn!!