Product of the Day: UnitedLinux 1.0
Product: UnitedLinux 1.0Manufacturer: UnitedLinuxAddress: 401 Edgewater Place, Suite 600 Wakefield, Massachusetts 01880Telephone: 781-876-8989URL: www.unitedlinux.com
In November 2002, UnitedLinux released Version 1.0 of its UnitedLinux product, a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. UnitedLinux is the result of an industry initiative to streamline Linux development and certification around a global, uniform distribution of Linux. The founding companies of UnitedLinux are Linux industry leaders Conectiva S.A., The SCO Group (NASDAQ:SCOX), SuSE Linux AG, and Turbolinux, Inc. 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.
"UnitedLinux has successfully reached its first major milestone by delivering Version 1.0 according to the schedule laid out last spring when the group was formed," said Paula Hunter, general manager of UnitedLinux. "The launch of UnitedLinux Version 1.0 is a tribute to the collaborative skills and technical expertise of the four founding companies, as well as to the vision that brought the UnitedLinux organization into being."
Built on top of a solid and tested foundation, UnitedLinux 1.0 is an enterprise-focused operating system with exceptional stability, scalability and reliability, and its high level of quality has been previously available only in expensive proprietary operating systems. Distributed virtually everywhere in the world and supported by leading global ISVs and IHVs, UnitedLinux Version 1.0 will initially be available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French and Hungarian. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 will have local language and local time zone support for customers around the world, with access to a channel of more than 16,000 resellers and a global pre- and post-sales support team.
UnitedLinux Version 1.0 incorporates a wide range of features that enhance its usefulness for enterprise environments. Some highlights are:
Standards compliance: UnitedLinux supports key community standards, such as LSB 1.2 and OpenI18N from the Free Standards group. Adhering to these standards allows broader hardware and software vendor support as well as adoption by large enterprises with heterogeneous IT shops. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 has met the stringent requirements of LSB certification.
Scalability: Enterprise server configurations continue to grow, with larger, more powerful multi-processors handling more users, tasks and threads. Enhancements contained in UnitedLinux Version 1.0 improve Linux's ability to take advantage of larger and more complex systems and thus handle new categories of applications. Specifics include:
Complete set of software and tools to build server farms, where workloads would otherwise be unmanageable for a single machine
Scheduler enhancements to improve process scheduling on multiprocessor systems to avoid the scheduler becoming a bottleneck
Asynchronous Input/Output, to minimize waiting on I/O in large, busy systems
Reliability: As Linux has grown from early applications into more business-critical areas, the availability expectations of users have grown as well. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 bolsters Linux's capabilities in avoiding downtime and in diagnosing and fixing problems when they do occur. New capabilities include:
A flexible and powerful POSIX-compliant event logging and notification capability
Dynamic probes that greatly enhance profiling and debugging, and allow dynamic insertion of breakpoints in code
Non-disruptive and tailored dumping of system data
Toolkit that significantly improves Linux's ability to record and trace system events
Hotplug PCI support, enabling the addition or removal of attached devices without system restart
Security: UnitedLinux 1.0 is suitable for sectors where security is critical Security features in UnitedLinux include support for Kerberos, a strong network authentication protocol; basic firewall support to separate secure areas of the system from less restricted areas; and a consolidated set of community security enhancements known as Bastille.
File Systems: UnitedLinux addresses the growing need of enterprise users for robust and scalable file systems. Journaling file systems offer improved scalability, stability and throughput. UnitedLinux includes support for the following journaling file systems: ReiserFS, Ext3, XFS and JFS.
Logical Volume Manager Support: Volume managers allow for flexibility, stability, improved performance and redundancy by logically linking multiple physical hard drives into one volume. UnitedLinux includes two major volume management technologies, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS), a layered, plug-in means of providing exceptional flexibility and extensibility in managing storage.
Platform support: UnitedLinux Version 1.0 will be available for the following architectures: x86 32-bit, IA64, x86-64, and IBM z, i and pseries.
Development Environment: UnitedLinux 1.0 provides a development environment for ISVs that includes compilers, includes, libraries, sources, text editors, graphical user interface support and other tools to enable the building of applications for UnitedLinux.
Being developed to unify rather than to fragment Linux offerings, UnitedLinux allows Linux vendors, ISVs, IHVs and OEMs to support a single, high value Linux offering, instead of many different versions. This focuses more resources on the advancement of Linux, thus creating a much higher quality, more functional product than could be developed otherwise.
Additional product details are contained in a UnitedLinux white paper at www.unitedlinux.com. Products powered by UnitedLinux are being offered by the four founding companies: details are available on request from Conectiva S. A., www.unitedlinux@conectiva.com, The SCO Group www.unitedlinux@sco.com, SuSE Linux AG - unitedlinux@suse.com; Turbolinux, Inc., unitedlinux@turbolinux.com.
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