A few weeks ago, Gael Duval lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding his new project a little bit by ‘leaking’ some screenshots and information. Obviously, a lot of questions remained, and hence we contacted Gael Duval in order to ask him some basic questions about Ulteo. Read on for the mini-interview.1) Ulteo will be based on Kubuntu, which gives you an already fairly solid base to work from. However, Kubuntu has also turned into the ‘de-facto’ standard KDE distribution. What exactly will set Ulteo apart from Kubuntu?
We base Ulteo on Ubuntu and Debian packages. Since April, we have developed a complete and automatic new builder which takes various sources, apply possible patches and puts all of that together to release an installable Linux system.
The first alpha of Ulteo will actually have more in common with Kubuntu than with Ubuntu, but anyway we won’t put only KDE packages in this version of Ulteo, which makes a first difference.
Aditionally, Ulteo will have different behaviour than this Linux distribution regarding the way it installs and the way you administer them.
2) Will Ulteo be a KDE-only project, or will a GNOME-based Ulteo also be available?
Our plans are to release a K-based project to start, and then the G-based. Later, we even plan a release with Enlightnement and XFCE.
3) Will individuals or companies be able to run their own Ulteo Connected Desktop servers, or will the client only be usable with Ulteo’s own servers?
Yes, we plan to release the Connected Desktop server for both individuals, and possibly corporates. Anyway, it will have to be consolidated and documented first. So there will be a delay.
4) Will there be a free (as in, freely downloadable) version of Ulteo?
Absolutely. In fact, the Ulteo OS (the one that is installable) and the Connected Desktop will be freely downloadable and installable.
5) And in relation to this, will Ulteo be Free, or will it have non-Free packages such as graphics drivers, Flash support, etc.?
We will offer the choice to users to use them or not, anyway the Sun JRE and also the Flash player are incorporated by default within the standard Connected Desktop web browser.
6) If you had to name one single feature or strong point of your former project, Mandriva, that you would like to see in Ulteo, what would that be? Also, what specific feature of another distribution would you like to see in Ulteo?
Well… most of the features that have been brought by Mandrake Linux in 2000, such as the graphical package manager, the graphical installer, or the security layer have been adopted by most modern Linux distributions.
So of course we want to offer at least everything that is already available in modern Linux systems 🙂
But with Ulteo we plan to go further.
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Edited 2006-10-11 15:36
He really didn’t say much about what sets Ulteo apart from Kubuntu other than the fact that it will apparently have non-KDE software included. Hopefully there will be some more information what will differentiate it (if anything) in the near future.
Though I’ll stay with Kubuntu for now.
I don’t see the point. This looks a lot like a thin client based distro, one more.
Actually, Gael came out and said that this is *not* going to be a thin-client distribution. It will be much closer to Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc.
If a product is discussed that presumably not everyone knows about, could a simple description of say, a line long, be included in the summary?
Saves having to click to another story from where we have to click to yet another page.
Saves having to click to another story from where we have to click to yet another page.
But then you will miss seeing all the ads…
He had an opportunity to convince us and to tell us what makes Ulteo different. He didn’t.
If Ulteo does do something different, then it’ll probably be ported or implemented in other Linux distros shortly after anyway.
At the end of the day, it’ll be yet another slightly incompatible “yawn”, to further confuse people considering using “Linux” and annoy developers who are trying to maintain (already large) auto-configure scripts.
Did I mention I can predict the future? In the year 2020 the number of people using each OS for desktop and server purposes will go something like this:
Windows, 70%
OS X, 20%
Misc BSD, almost none
Solarix, almost none
Ulteo, almost none
Redhat, almost none
Gentoo, almost none
Kubuntu/Ubunto, almost none
Mandriva, almost none
Debain, almost none
Knoppix, almost none
Slackware, almost none
Yellog Dog, almost none
Fedora, almost none
Other (misc. alternative), almost none
Of course I may be wrong – one day these fools might actually start thinking and we might see something like this instead:
Standard Linux, 55%
Windows, 30%
OS X, 10%
Misc BSD, almost none
Solarix, almost none
Other (misc. alternative), almost none
I guess that’s one of the “5 freedoms” though – everyone is free to turn it into a fragmented mess…. 🙂
How do you propose this “Standard Linux” come about?
I should mention that by 2020, the number of users on Indian and Chinese Linux-based OSes will probably outnumber those who can afford OSX or whatever OS Apple is releasing (if any, since it is a business, not a science/tool) at that time.
“Kubuntu has also turned into the ‘de-facto’ standard KDE distribution.”
From where do you guys have this information? Your imagination? Please don’t post such nonsense if you cannot verify it.
PS: Brendan, it is Solaris, not Solarix.
Ad I doubt that RedHat will loose its quite significant market share in the server and corporate desktop market anytime soon. They are an established company, even more than Mac that lost quite a lot of its business customers during the last years.
Is software installation. Based on this interview and others, it sounds like Gael wants to (FINALLY) make a Linux distro with Windows-like installation procedure so that anyone can pick it up and use it without having to understand what makes Linux different. I wouldn’t underestimate this man. You must remember that he took plain old Red Hat and made it into a much more consumer-friendly OS, and in fact Mandrake was the very first distro to do so successfully (seeing as Corel ended up leaving the marketplace for quite a few years before Xandros was released based on their code).
Edited 2006-10-12 19:52