Industry Leading Technology Providers Sponsor Launch Event
Las Vegas 11/19/2002
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. UnitedLinux is the result of an industry
initiative to streamline Linux development and certification around a
global, uniform distribution of Linux. 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.
Sponsors of the UnitedLinux 1.0 launch event are HP (NYSE:HPQ) and IBM
(NYSE:IBM). Today's announcement was made during the UnitedLinux
press conference at the COMDEX event in Las Vegas.
"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. "Today's 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-class 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. Details of
global training and certification programs will be made public in the
near future.
"As the leading provider of industry-standard Linux
hardware and a long time proponent of open-source computing, HP
believes in offering our customers the choice to deploy Linux across
the platforms that best meet their individual computing needs,"
said Rick Becker, HP Vice President, Software CTO, Industry Standard
Servers. "With the delivery of UnitedLinux Version 1.0 we are able
to offer our customers, across the world, additional choice and
flexibility, enabling them to deploy the best Linux solution for their
business."
"Customers want to rapidly deploy Linux-based applications to
realize business value, and ISVs want a common, reliable, standards
based platform upon which to build their applications," said Steve
Solazzo, General Manager, Linux, IBM. "Today's delivery of
UnitedLinux Version 1.0, right on schedule, simplifies the tasks for
application providers and customers alike, allowing them to more
rapidly deploy Linux solutions with confidence."
UnitedLinux Version 1.0 incorporates a wide range of features that
enhance its usefulness for enterprise environments. Details are
contained in a UnitedLinux white paper at www.unitedlinux.com. Some
highlights are:
- Standards compliance: UnitedLinux support for key
community standards, such as LSB 1.2 and OpenI18N from the Free
Standards group, 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 in UnitedLinux 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, for
workloads that would otherwise be unmanageable for a single machine
- Scheduler enhancements to improve process scheduling on SMPs and avoid
the scheduler becoming a bottleneck
- Asynchronous Input/Output, to minimize waiting on I/O in large, busy systems
- High Availability: 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
improves Linux's suitability for sectors where security is
critical, by offering 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: As the data needs of enterprise users continue
to grow, the demands on the underlying file system(s) have grown as
well. UnitedLinux addresses this issue by including support for the
Journaling File System (JFS), which is an extremely scalable, stable,
and high throughput filesystem, and the popular community filesystems
Reiser File System (ReiserFS), XFS, and the ext3 filesystem.
- Network/storage/device management: As Linux becomes more widely used,
the numbers and types of devices that users need continue to grow. In
addition, enterprise customers expect their device drivers to be
robust, and network protocols continue to evolve. In addition to basic
IPv6 support, UnitedLinux 1.0 meets these challenges by supporting
Logical Volume Manager (LVM), a popular community volume manager, and
Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS), a layered, plug-in means of
providing exceptional flexibility and extensibility in managing
storage. Device drivers supported include Ethernet, Fibre Channel,
Token Ring, ODBC, Tape, SCSI, among others.
- Platform support and interoperability: For the foreseeable future, enterprises will depend
on a heterogeneous computing environment. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 takes
advantage of hardware capability across all relevant platforms and
architectures, including Intel (32 and 64-bit), AMD, PowerPC (IBM
eServer iSeries and pSeries), and IBM eServer zSeries mainframe.
Hardware functionality is exploited through advanced features such as
large memory support for up to 64 GB of RAM, hardware technology for
compressing main memory contents called Memory Expansion Technology
(MXT), and graphical connection support.
- Development Environment: UnitedLinux 1.0 provides a development environment for ISVs that
includes all the compilers, includes, libraries, sources, text editors,
graphical user interface support and other tools to enable the building
of applications for UnitedLinux.
Products powered by UnitedLinux are being offered by the four founding
companies. Details are available on request from
Conectiva S. A. - unitedlinux@conectiva.com
The SCO Group - unitedlinux@sco.com
SUSE Linux AG - unitedlinux@suse.com
Turbolinux, Inc. - unitedlinux@turbolinux.com
About UnitedLinux
UnitedLinux is a partnership of industry-leading
Linux companies combining their intellectual property, geographic mind
share, sales, support and marketing expertise to produce a uniform
distribution of Linux designed for business. UnitedLinux applies the
collaborative development model of open source to the business model to
enable a one-stop shop for developers, partners and customers to
install, support and maintain quality business solutions based on Linux
anywhere in the world. UnitedLinux is actively recruiting membership
for both industry software developers and those who provide Linux as an
integral part of their business solutions. For more information, visit
www.unitedlinux.com or call UnitedLinux at +1-781-876-8989.
About Novell
Novell, Inc. is a leading provider of information solutions that deliver secure identity management (Novell® Nsure™), Web application development (Novell exteNd™) and cross-platform networking services (Novell Nterprise™), all supported by strategic consulting and professional services (Novell NgageSM). Active in the open source community with its Ximian and SUSE Linux brands, Novell is firmly committed to open source and offers comprehensive Linux products and services for the enterprise, from the desktop to the server. Novell's vision of one Net - a world without information boundaries - helps customers realize the value of their information securely and economically. For more information, call Novell's Customer Response Center at (888) 321-4CRC (4272) or visit http://www.novell.com. Press should visit http://www.novell.com/pressroom.
Novell is a registered trademarks; Nsure, exteNd and Nteprise are trademarks; and Ngage is a service mark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SUSE is a registered trademark of SUSE Linux AG. * All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Press Contact:
Jasmin Ul-Haque
Novell, Inc
Phone: +44 (0)1344 326-900
E-mail: juh@novell.com
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