United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimise duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SuSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva and The SCO Group (formerly Caldera Systems). The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. Its end was announced on January 22, 2004.

History

With the rise of Linux during the 1990s, GNU/Linux distributions proliferated. Since the Linux kernel and GNU userland were both free software, anyone could put together and market a distribution. Many industry observers feared fragmentation and wide-ranging incompatibility, similar to the UNIX wars of the early 1990s.

The first moves towards the United Linux project were made at COMDEX in November 1999. There were a number of false starts, but the participants consistently agreed that a unified GNU/Linux platform for business made sense. The key factors for success were identified early in 2000.

Starting in March and April 2002, the United Linux board put together a base technical specification, getting input from the four consortium members and their business partners and vendors.

The project was announced to the world on May 30, 2002. A first beta was released to United Linux member partners on August 14, 2002, a public beta was released on September 25, 2002 and United Linux 1.0 was released on November 19, 2002.

Technical overview

The distribution was based on SuSE Linux and the Linux Standard Base, with the plan being for SuSE to do most of the engineering work and SCO, Turbolinux and Conectiva primarily to market the distribution in their territories and markets [1].

It was planned that version 1.0 would take six to eight months to release, be the current version for one year and be supported for another year after the release of 2.0. Minimum technical requirements were:

• Kernel 2.4.18 or higher
• glibc 2.2.5
• Linux Standard Base compliant
• OpenI18N (formerly LI18NUX ) compliant (internationalization and localization)
• GB18030 compliant (the standard CJK character encoding used in China)
• GCC 3.1
• XFree86 4.2
• KDE 3.0

The end of United Linux

The end of United Linux was announced in a Novell press conference on January 22, 2004 by Richard Seibt, president of the SuSE division. The stated reason was that the SCO v. IBM lawsuit and SCO's public attacks on Linux had made the alliance unworkable.

It emerged that no real work had been done on United Linux since soon after SCO v. IBM had started, and that SuSE had ceased active participation around this time. The last United Linux announcements were of Oracle support for United Linux on 13 March 2003, and of AMD64 CPU support on 22 April 2003.

Despite the failure of the united front, many believed United Linux had the desired effect: increased corporate awareness of Linux — particularly SuSE's version — and increased participation in Linux by software and hardware vendors, leading to wider compatibility. SuSE has announced continued support for United Linux 1.0 and that it will continue to work with Conectiva and Turbolinux, the remaining consortium members.

Others still attempt to form a credible GNU/Linux distribution for business. The most significant example is Novell. Their purchase of both Suse and Ximian, combined with their existing customer base promise a strong competitor to Red Hat. Another approach is the Bruce Perens' UserLinux initiative. This is an attempt to bring the community process that created the Debian base to the process of assembling and configuring a distribution package specialized for the enterprise desktop.

See Also

• Linux Core Consortium (homepage)
• Comparison of Linux distributions

External links

• Official home page
• Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, Turbolinux Partner To Create UnitedLinux, And Produce A Uniform Version Of Linux For Business - Press release, May 30 2002
• UnitedLinux, RIP - eWeek, Jan 23, 2004