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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."
I predict that United Linux is going to become the Most Popular OS ever!!!
-Everyone is going to use it.
-Windows Will become Obsolete
-It will revolutionize the computing industry as we know it
Then we will find out that the Secret Owner of the Company is Bill Gates
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I have beta tested SCOs version of UnitedLinux. UnitedLinux is basically Caldera mixed with SuSE. It's not hat great unless you really like SuSE stuff (YASTA, etc).
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
UnitedLinux has completed beta testing of the first release of its open source Linux operating system
(emphasis mine)
Given that United Linux uses YaST as it's installer, the operating system is dependant up on that non-free (and hence non Open Source) program, which renders the whole thing non-free.
United Linux, like SuSE, is not Free Softwae, so it is not Open Source.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
I'll stick with RedHat myself. And let me tell you, corporations will do the same. Why? RedHat's proven. UnitedLinux (I thought it was just supposed to be a body of standards? Eh?) isn't. They'd best hope they have the venture capital to stick it out.
That said, what ever happened to Random Love or whatnot?
My second wife was a beta tester for the latest version (release candidate).
She told me all about it to stuff it in my face. One of the differences for us that caused the divorce was that I was a big Windows user (although I did run Linux on one of my machines, which she took through the divorce), and she was a big Linux and BSD user. I can honestly say that I am strictly a windows user because she took all the boxes with Linux on them.
Anyway, she said it has some features that will 'blow windows AND linux users away.' I'd say more, but don't know if I'm allowed to tell the info legally (trust me, she's already taken me to the cleaners, once).
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
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."
A subarctic creature, through a window slides,
A fractured system is united,
The Gates of hell opened,
A dot is slashed with the multitudes in great debate.
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!
Why do people try to put UL and RH against each other? UL is een open initiative in which Linux distro's can participate. This includes RH. So i don't understand the fuss.. what i do know is that people are still thinking that RH is big in the entire world. IT'S NOT!!!. Here in Europe SuSE is one of the biggest distro's and RedHat is, although known to most, over here what SuSE is to u in the US.
Furthermore, the fact that this UL distro looks like a mix of SuSE and SCO's linux distro is because they put the most effort in this for the moment.
It remains to be seen if this initiative attracts ISV though. And that is not because of lack of support but more an economical reason. Since it is not easy in this economical climate most ISV would rather stay on the beaten path then try to find new roads..
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.
Apart from price, UnitedLinux is introducing new features, such as larger memory support, to differentiate itself from the competition, Hunter said.
/really/ means?
Uhh, large memory support is standard in the kernel? Any idea what this
note, that's larger memory support.
According to this whitepaper they are increasing the supported memory size from 1gb to 64gb. Here is a quote from it:
Large memory support
The Linux kernel is ordinarily limited to 1 GB of physical memory on the x86 32-
bit platform, with 4 GB of virtual addressing space. With large memory support,
Linux can take advantage of the Intel Physical Address Extension to support up to
64 GB of physical RAM and the full 4 GB of virtual addressing space per process.
In addition, with AMD x86-64, Linux can enable highly efficient flat 64-bit memory
addressibility for enterprise systems.