Today the UnitedLinux group announced the release of Version 1.0 of its UnitedLinux product, a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. Founding companies of UnitedLinux are Linux industry leaders Conectiva, SCO Group, SuSE and Turbolinux. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 is the engine that powers products to be sold by the four companies, each with its own local language support, value-add features, and pricing. There is already a new article, describing UnitedLinux, at DeveloperWorks. Our Take: Erm, great, but why there isn’t a “buy now” link or a “contact me” form anywhere in that site?
UnitedLinux Releases Version 1.0
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m using Opera 7 Beta and whenever I go to the site I get a JVM error (Java Vitual Machine). Is there a link on the site to a pure text/HTML version?
I get the same error in Opera 6.05. No error in IE6, surprisingly… </sarcasm>
Their frontpage *is* a pure html version, they just have an applet running on the right hand side of the page. If your Opera is spitting out error for the WHOLE page and not for the rectangle that contains the applet, this is an Opera bug and you should report it to bugs.opera.com. And in the meantime, use a non-beta browser to browse their site.
Works fine on my Opera 6.05 on Windows (non-java version). As I said, this is an Opera bug when you are using the Java version. Opera should not have completely demise the rendering of the whole page, but only the rectangle with the applet.
Oy…
I’ve encountered this a lot, actually. On both 6.05 (very stable) and 7.0 (beta). 7.0 supposedly installed a new version of the JVM, so that’s not likely to be the issue. Then again, I *am* on Windows ME. Sorry about taking up thread space on this…last post, I promise…
You go to one of the respective vendors that make up UnitedLinux. Either SCO, SuSE, Connectiva or TurboLinux.
Or fringe companies in danger of being marginalized? I realize press-releases exaggerate, but this is just plain an outright lie!
Site works fine for me with Mozilla 1.1 running on Debian GNU/Linux. Definitely sounds like a bug in Opera.
>You go to one of the respective vendors that make up UnitedLinux
I couldn’t find to buy it there either.
And it is not clear at all on the UL web site that you have to do that anyway.
Isn’t that what United Linux is kind of doing? What would the point be of being say connectiva and developing on two distros at the same time? Because as I’ve just heard about SCO(formally known as Caldera) had just released 4.0.
I’m not trying to start some sort of flame war. just a bit confused.
ment for the title. fragmentation. arg.
SCO:
http://wdb1.caldera.com/clbk_web/owa/dwn_customer
Conectiva: http://www.conectiva.com.br/cpub/pt/downloads/index.php
SuSE: (no download found)
http://www.suse.com/us/ul.html
TurboLinux:
ftp://ftp.turbolinux.com
UnitedLinux is not a standalone distro. It is designed to form a ‘base’ for commercial distros. The vendors can’t produce anything final until the base is complete. Now that UL 1.0 is finished, companies like SuSE and SCO are able to finish developing their distros. This will obviously take a little more time. Some final versions (e.g. SuSE Enterprise 8 & SCO Linux 4.0) have already been announced, but they won’t be released before December.
So much for the LSB. When you “buy” “United” linux you just trading open standards for closed ones.
sounds good then.
ment to say “good” to the reply “re: regarding…”
site is fine for me in opera7b on a win2k box.
And you download from where exactly.. holy annoying.
Not so fast, “Anonymous”…
“The company [SCO Group] did not say during press briefings Monday what versions of various Linux packages — kernel, compiler, and C and C++ libraries — are shipping with SCO Linux 4.0, which will feature a KDE-based desktop, though the distribution is not designed especially for desktop use. The company did say that the distribution offers high reliability and availability, clustering, and increased memory support, while remaining LSB compliant.”
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=…
Enough said?
I find it ironic that they seem to want this distribution to be so standards-compliant that it is somewhat bulletproof in the sense that it should be able to handle basically any software out there … yet it is imposing upon itself an ALREADY deprecated ABI for C++ programs by using gcc 3.1 instead of 3.2. Not only that, a deprecated and fairly shallowly-used ABI when compared to the 2.95 branch (although, granted, 3.1 is leaps and bounds better from what I’ve read from the GCC team).
UnitedLinux uses GCC 3.2, NOT GCC 3.1
I actually get that on http://www.osnews.com also, opera 6.05, windows XP.
This is the beginning of a beautiful flamewar.
When Redhat 8.0 was released there was a lot of noise
about the krippled KDE.
I have not read everything about United Linux, but it
appears that Gnome is not distributed on United Linux at
all. Nothing strange about that since the United Linux
participants are KDE oriented.
But at least it was possible to choose KDE in redhat …
Now life isn’t fair, but I think that the unfairness
in the problem of the krippled KDE in RH and the absence
of Gnome in United linux are actually quit equal.
Yes, Gnome doesn’t seem to be in UnitedLinux. Then again, UnitedLinux is _not_ a distribution. If the distributors want to add Gnome to their distros they will do so.
But remember that the whole point of UL is to provide a _unified_ base system on which you can build other applications. If there were two desktop environments in UL, that’d hardly classify as “unified”, would it?
Industry leaders != Companies in a dominant position.
Or fringe companies in danger of being marginalized?
SuSE is the premier European Linux company, Connectiva is well represented in Latin America I hear (being a brazilian company ) and SCO (Caldera) while going trough some rough times is not down for the count.
I wouldn’t call them marginalized, in fact it makes a lot of sense for them to pool resources.
Not according to the IBM dW article, it doesn’t.
A set of base specifications was necessary, as this would define the launch point for all other specifications. Each of the base components were discussed at length to ensure that the first generation of UnitedLinux would last a distance of at least two years from date of release. It was recognized that the development and release cycle for version 1.0 would take six to eight months and that the product itself would be current for 12 months from day of first shipment and would be supported for another 12 months following the release of version 2.0. The UnitedLinux board arrived at the following list:
* Kernel 2.4.18 or higher
* glibc 2.2.5
* GCC 3.1
* XFree86 4.2
* KDE 3.0
* LSB compliant
* OpenI18N (formerly Li18nux) compliant
* GB18030 compliant
Yes, I know it says you can install gcc 3.2 later in that article, but that doesn’t mean it is based upon gcc 3.2 (hell, I have gcc 3.2 installed, but it’s certainly not the default compiler on my system).
First, I want to say I support the Idea. I used to work in Electronics Contract Manufacturing (building circut boards) and most companies have to buy machines from Three continents (Japan, US, Germany) to get a working plant. That means currently the only way to get computer-based machines from vendors in all three countries is to use windows. This plan allows LOCAL Linux companies to keep their user bases, retail sales, ect. SuSe is big in Germany home of Siemens and has IBM’s blessing; Turbolinux is big in Asia-Many TW mainboards come with a Turbolinux distro. This plan allow manufactures, business programmers, ect. from various countries to use their own readilly available (and Native-born) distros and still connect with unrelated programming done in other countries. i.e. I can develop my own MRP app in house using Caldera (USA) but install components on PC based machines from Germany and Japan and be confident that it will work properly without extreme amounts of testing.
Boys and Girls, this is what YOU want! This means YOU can get a local distro and push the boss to use it. As this takes off, those of you that contract can work multi-national manufacturing environments and be very productive. Mostly, this removes the key reason most machine makers use only MS–they have to guarentee operabiltiy in multiple countries and right now only MS does that.
What makes you think that? You can read my review of the UL beta, where I do mention Gnome, because I tried it. It’s there! So, the only version of UL that saw the day of light, had Gnome in it. What reason do we have for saying UL won’t come with Gnome?
“So much for the LSB. When you “buy” “United” linux you just trading open standards for closed ones.”
Which closed one? Aside from that UL is fully LSB conform.
I’ve worked with the various beta releases of United Linux that SuSE has provided over the past few months and I just wanted to clarify a few points.
First, United Linux consists of a base distribuition in a specific arrangement on a specific set of cds. Each vendor is able to add additional discs but my understanding is that you can install just the base cds and hava a working system. The goal of this arrangement is to allow software vendors to certify their apps on United Linux and not have to test them on four different distros. This is in the hopes that vendors won’t just stop at certifying on RedHat.
Second, every version of United Linux I’ve seen uses gcc3.2. I expect someone over at DW just made a mistake.
Finally, every version of UL I’ve seen has included gnome. It’s not the “preferred” desktop, so they haven’t done any enhancements to it, but some people might think that is a good thing anyway.
I’ve only actually used the SuSE version of UL, so I can’t say absolutely that all of these statements apply to all of the vendors, but I’d be highly surprised if they don’t.
I believe that UL is LSB conformant, and it certainly does refer to the LSB in the internal documentation. But I don’t know if they are claiming conformance officially.
United Linux 1.0 is LSB conformant.
On http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/cert_prodlist.tpl
you find the official list of certified LSB distributions,
including United Linux 1.0
Cheers,
Waldo