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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.
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
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
...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
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).
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.