UnitedLinux 1.0 Announced

Major Linux vendors to resell core UnitedLinux operating system

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 11/21/2002

UnitedLinux is based on SuSE’s Enterprise Server, but all four member companies are expected to sell applications and services based upon the core UnitedLinux operating system. The SCO Group, Connectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux plan to share royalties associated with sales of UnitedLinux.

UnitedLinux is available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French and Hungarian language editions.

UnitedLinux Group says the initial release of the UnitedLinux operating system addresses a variety of issues, including standards compliance, scalability, availability, security and management.

In the area of standards compliance, for example, UnitedLinux supports version 1.2 of the Linux Standards Base (LSB), a set of standards that increase compatibility among Linux distributions and which enable software applications to run on any LSB-compliant Linux system.

As for scalability, UnitedLinux ships with software and tools that customers can use to build server farms to support distributed workloads. UnitedLinux also features scheduler enhancements that can help to improve scalability in SMP configurations.

Availability enhancements include support for Hotplug PCI, which enables administrators to swap components in or out of a system while it is still online.

UnitedLinux enjoys support from a variety of industry players, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. IBM, for example, has pledged to support UnitedLinux on its eServer platforms. As it now stands, the first revision of UnitedLinux runs on IBM’s Power microprocessors—which anchor its iSeries and pSeries product lines—along with Big Blue’s zSeries mainframes.

IBM signed an agreement with Linux vendor Red Hat in September to market enterprise Linux solutions. The company supports a variety of Linux distributions across its eServer platforms, including Red Hat, SuSE and now UnitedLinux.