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UnitedLinux Ready for Official Launch
Anonymous Coward writes " PCWORLD has the word that UnitedLinux has completed beta testing of the first release of its open source Linux operating system and is ready to launch the product as planned next month, said company manager Paula Hunter Tuesday at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Frankfurt, Germany."
UnitedLinux.com has no information about this release however?
/really/ means?
From the article:
Apart from price, UnitedLinux is introducing new features, such as larger memory support, to differentiate itself from the competition, Hunter said.
Uhh, large memory support is standard in the kernel? Any idea what this
-- Azaroth
How many months ago did they announce this happening? Now they are already set to release a real product. If this was a collaboration of a bunch of proprietary software companies, they'd still be hashing out legal agreeements. United Linux itself doesn't interest me that much, but the fact that such things are possible does.
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The main benefit of UL is that it will present a united spec to compete against Red Hat. From the ISV and hardware vendor perspective, this is good, because there will be only two Linux distro specs being used in the business world where they will hawk their goods. Debian ought to count as a third but it doesn't have the marketshare or mindshare (except among diehard admins, of course).
Only good can come of this, though I really don't see UL being able to overcome Red Hat.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
Our company has been using (and buying) SuSE distributions for years now and we were pretty happy with it until they got to 8.0 when so many things were broken/changed that we couldn't use it any longer as a server OS. The big changes were the loss of the ability to edit the configuration files; especially in regards to selecting which services start during boot. It proved almost impossible, for instance, to keep portmap from starting without mucking about in the bowels of the boot sequence. It seemed to us that 8.0 was aimed squarely at the desktop market and its functionality as a server was reduced.
Since most of our installs are servers, we stopped buying the 5 or 6 copies of the distribution we normally buy and instead went back to using the single copy of 7.3 we had laying around the lab.
What I'm afraid of with United Linux is that SuSE will have moved their own distribution (which I liked to call "The Lego Set of Operating Systems") from an all-purpose distro (at a great price: $79) to a desktop-only solution. The UL distro will be moved in (at a significantly higher price point) to fill the server niche. Thus we will have to buy two distributions from SuSE (a la RedHat) whereas before one did everything. (And yes, I know they had a $39.95 "personal" edition but that always looked to me to be the loss-leader for ads that brought people into the store to turn them for the higher value product.)
This makes me nervous. Our comapany's future depends on the solidity of the distribution we choose. Our competitiveness rests on our ability to buy the OS at prices that put our MS rivals out of the bidding. I am not comfortable with distributions that tinker with what I thought was a winning recipe.
Our move to SuSE was away from RH during the glibc debacle (version 4 or 5 of RH, I forget now). Our move away from SuSE (to Debian, perhaps) might be imminent. It will all depend on how they price this new United Linux offering and what it offers our customers.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Seriously, migrate to Debian. It's rock solid stable, you can choose exactly how it runs and it won't cost you a dime.
You could download it over the net and start playing with it on a beta machine today if you wanted.
On average, not bloody quickly. Microsoft Windows, for example, that wonderful operating system that supposedly has a monopoly, didn't take off over night, now, did it?
The fact is, most for-profit Linux companies are known to have certain problems when it comes to the ability to throw large sums of money about with wild abandon.
Unless UnitedLinux can afford to wage an aggressive campaign of marketing, tech support, and general 'Hey guys! Look at us! See what we can do!'.. By the time anyone considers it for a business deployment large enough to matter, the good folks at UL will already be ripping copper out of the walls to recycle so they can gas up their SUV's.
It will be harder to get Windows people to migrate to Linux if the trend of adding more flavors :) I've only tried out Red Hat, but I won't migrate away from Windows until I've :)
continues. To me it's like they're making coffee from the same set of coffee beans, and then add
their own special flavor to it, like milk, sugar etc. All these different versions makes a beginner
rather confused. I bet a lot of people ask themselves "Which Linux shall I choose???"... Well,
at least I do.
figured out why there's so many different flavors of Linux. I don't think I'm alone in this quest for
knowledge. Anyway, I'm not in a rush... I'll waste the time to STFW.
"So many much more interesting free software projects?" Like what? The window manager of the week? More KDE or Gnome silliness? Yet another incomplete and not-worth-my-time OpenOffice build? Mozilla, that isn't finished yet?
I have to say that United Linux is just as interesting as all the other unfinished hobby projects-- er, I mean "free software projects"-- out there.
(Mod away.)
I write in my journal