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Upheavals In UnitedLinux
An anonymous reader writes "I found this story on UnixReview.com - vnunet has some commentary about UnitedLinux and it sounds like it's struggling." I dunno - I plan on still giving them the benefit of the doubt, and see what comes out. Heck, I might even try installing a machine with the "united distro" - but it's still an interesting pickle some of the primary members are in.
they've never really seemed all that 'united' to me...
A Linux standard would be nice, that's for sure. But I still kinda like having the choice of flavors with different distros. Gives you options for specific tasks.
The focus should be Linux on the Desktop. The only thing holding it back are the companies who refuse (or are prevented by Microsoft) to port their apps to Linux. Come on, people. Give it up!
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
In my opinion Suse has always been one of the best distros out there. What kind of market share does Redhat hold anyway. I haven't seen any solid figures on the number of enterprises that use one distro as opposed to another. I know when I was the only linux geek in my shop, we all ran Suse. But another (more hardcore) friend of mine, decided that all the people in his office would run Debian. Who makes that call one way or another? Plus being the only linux capable person in the office, is great job security.
I've never tried any of the distros made by the people behind UnitedLinux, but I liked the idea that even if I found myself straying from my favorite, there were always quite a few other *quality* places to go to get something just a little different. Just because Redhat is growing by leaps and bounds doesn't mean everyone in the game has to come together just to compete. We're talking about things that usually take a while in an industry to happen, when it does a few things occur. Competition decreases, and consumer satisfaction bottoms out with it. Do we really need that kind of thing already?
I know, I'm being a little dramatic, there are tons and tons of distros rolling around but when a few big ones jump into bed, they become something that places like Redhat do have to deal with..I guess the point is why now? Redhat in the grand scheme of things is still pretty small, there's plenty of time to ramp up competition and let everyone use a field of quality products rather than a few.
Maybe of they re-visit this idea in a few years, it'll be more viable. Until them, they should all just chill and keep growing up a bit.
http://about.me/paultenny
United:
1. Combined into a single entity. 2. Conserned with, produced by,or resulting from mutual action. 3. Being in harmony; agreed.
Pull it together guys!
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
Out of all the Linux distos, I am using Redhat 7.3 on the servers and Mandrake 9 rc1 as a workstation. I have tried most of them at one time. ASP Linux, Caldera, SuSE, Immunix, Lycoris, Vector, Debian, Astaro, all have brought a little something unique to the table.
What this will create is a organic, cross-pollinization of ideas, to improve over time, all of the independent distros out there. No single vendor has got it perfect yet, and all of the distros are working madly to give their distro a little something unique. The true determining factor will be standardization. No one wants to be the lone man out as far as file structure, /etc/rc.d/ layout, or whatever.
That being said, I think most enterprises want a solid, stable, clean disto that does not swing too wildly from release to release. Users may want to tinker with the bleeding edge, but business want a tool that helps their bottom line.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
...while we already have standarts...
:
See
http://www.linuxbase.org/
and If you think a Linux uses RFCs ( www.faqs.org/rfc ) as base and still a Linux system is POSIX ( http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG15 ) standarts compliant.
So why try to create standarts again?
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
by which definition?
Atleast not real-world definition, open source can be used as a tool for promoting or causing harm to a specific vendor(s). From Open Source Definition : "The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons"
So is it this? The license may not dicriminate anyone but you can choose to use an open source license when you know that selecting it instead of something else as licensing method discriminates someone. For example, if someone has cumulated capital in some form (wisdom, money, whatever) and then you half this someones capital (even if it was gathered by discrimination) by opensourcing you surely discriminate this someone. That does not mean open source is bad, it's still good atleast in my opinion, but it is not a magic hippiee miracle.
Bull! The point is that nobody has a monopoly on developing the code. Work for hire is welcome, and we're even starting to see it happen more often (and I can't wait for task markets to hit the big time).
But it sounded like a bad idea from the start.
Now, it's been what, a month and a half or so since it went public?
Nobody took it seriously then, and being as 2 out of the 3 companies involved in it are royally fucked, I don't know why this is such a surprise.
SCO>Caldera>SCO is fucked, turbolinux is *REALLY* fucked, and conectiva (which makes a great distribution, but I don't know anyone who actually uses it) is insignificant.
Unitedlinux was just a ploy to get stock prices driven back up. Obviously it didn't work. The market's smarter than that nowadays, after the "let's give 9 million dollars of VC money to shitonastick.com" tech bubble of the late 90's/very early 00's.
There's a pool going between my group of friends about when VA Ice Cream and Adult Novelties is going to be delisted. I call it VA Ice cream and Adult novelties because they've changed their business plan about 5 times in the last 4 years. Even their CEO bailed out (smart move there, larry. Hope you like that zaurus you put on your corporate american express platinum credit card at linuxworld nyc 2002. I was right behind you in line, and saw it, don't deny it. I'm glad you're still making 200+ grand a year, while most of the developers you brought on who worked for you are now either unemployed, or working at mcdonald's).
I guess I'm just trolling, but whatever. I'm just tired of people thinking that spin-doctoring bad ideas, throwing up lots of press releases, and *STILL* working off of bad business models will make everything okay.
here's a hint for those who think that spin-doctoring a bad business model will make everything okay: IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK, THE MARKET IS SMARTER THAN THAT!!!
Anyhow, enough trolling from me. Later.
United Linux is a wasted effort, the effort shouldn't be put into making a "distrobution" standard, as this "promotes" the splintering of groups of software and software would be inclined to be hardcoded to work in a certain way.
Idealy, effort should be put into making software that is configureable enough to be productive in any environment, not just a standard install of XYZ Linux. Setting a standard in stone, makes the environment less flexible, and software is written to be less flexible as a result.
Just my $.02
but Turbolinux has already sold its Linux business. What would they expect Turbolinux to contribute in this partnership? Turbo?
:)
So the finihsed product is being called Turbo UnitedLinux?
This article may shed some light on the matter.
Basically, the article implies that United Linux is a marketing scam for one of the distribution midgets. Its an opinion, but it makes sense.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I consult most of my time with large corporates on how to adopt Linux. They love the `obvious' stuff like Samba, Squid (kinda - but better content filtering tools would be nice) and the fact that there is the glimmerings of a 3rd-party software market. Examples of the latter are virus checkers, the towering presence of Oracle in the market and so on.
For them, Open Source is less a religion than a hard-headed business decision. They actually *like* paying money for software, it makes them feel comfortable. The fact that United Linux isn't free is actually a PLUS POINT for them. You can argue that they are crazy or whatever you want, but that's they way they react.
Now, what they really want is low risk. They want to be sure that the anti-virus software they purchase will install and run without problems. If they are running Oracle, it's crucial that it works properly - no downtime, no data loss.
So they are sceptical unless the software vendor certifies that the product concerened has been tested and deployed and is supported on the release of Linux that they have chosen.
It costs software companies a lot of money to do the appropriate testing, train helpdesk staff and do the documentation for each slightly different release of Linux. Even if my-favourite-distro is a byte by byte copy of Redhat 7.x, Oracle will simply say it's not supported because it didn't come with Redhat's logo on it. They will laugh in my face if I ask them to check that my distro is compatible, they will more likely ask me for a huge sum of cash to provide me with certification. They can afford to call the shots.
That's the real reason behind United Linux. To get 3rd party accreditation and reduce the apparent fragmentation of distributions. So that large companies can say "Oh, yeah, ok, your software is certified to run on the system I use" and then not have to think any more. They don't want to waste time checking that my distro IS Redhat, they just want to see the logo and get the support contract in from the software vendor.
Mike
I was soooo tempted to use the mod points i've got right now to slap down some of the people who seem to think that making a profit is evil. Get over it - isn't it the great american dream or something?
/srv/www/htdocs, floppy and cdrom mount points in /media/*, symlinked into /). Not sure if thats part of LSB. seems like an OK idea.
Anyhow, I decided to post about what it looks like:(i've got the first closed beta, beta-1)
It seems heavily SuSE influenced. YaST2 is the installer, so it works just like SuSE (from what I tremember installing SuSE 8 a while back). (there are bugs but it is beta-1... no big deal)
It's a 2 CD set right now (sources on disk 2), you get all the usual stuff you'd exepct. It's up to date but not bleeding edge: kernel 2.4.19, apache 1.3.26+mod_ssl2.8.10+mod_php4.2.2+mod_perl1.27, etc., Gnome 2, KDE3.0.3, Mozilla 1.0, perl 5.8, gcc3.2. OpenSSH3.4p1 out of the box, all dangerous services disabled in inetd.conf.
The file system is slightly different than SuSE (docroot in
note to trolls. shut up and wait until you've used it, you might actually think it's an improvement over SuSE (like I do). It's got a lot of potential, and hopefully will give RedHat a bit of competition. A couple of good distros aimed at corps, fighting it out - it can only be good for Linux uptake and the quality of the distros involved.
I don't understand why people think LSB makes UnitedLinux unnecessary. UnitedLinux and LSB are not the same thing: the former builds on top of the latter. In addition to the minimalist feature set in LSB, UL specifies a Java runtime, an SQL server, a printing system (CUPS), assorted networking stuff, KDE 3 and Gnome 2 libraries etc. See their white paper. This is a full, rich platform for third party apps. By contrast, LSB does not even specify Qt or Gtk libraries: you can't even target LSB with GUI apps. LSB alone is just not enough as a platform.
Manual search and replace all the way, it generates much better results, since connecting text can be adjusted.