Review: United Linux 1.0

Conclusion

A close look into United Linux 1.0 substantiates the not so new suspicion that the initative of the four UL companies essentialy is an attempt to stand up to Red Hat's overwhelming market potence and to counter Red Hat Advanced Server with a competitive product. Conectiva, SCO and Turbolinux apparently have insisted in delivering their own management tools as a last line of defense for differentiating "their" UL flavours from a plain SuSE SLES.

Albeit, with United Linux 1.0 the user gets a solid server product incorporating all essential daemons. SuSE offers its UL flavour (aka SLES8) for 899 Euro plus VAT, including socalled maintenance for one year. As United Linux proposes an admin-friendly release cycle of at least 12 month - with easily implementable fixes in between - that should do until the next major release.

However, there lies a certain risk in the fact that United Linux emanates from a code base which SuSE deliberately has decoupled from the community. Critics - not without cause - point out the intrinsic danger of code forking: United Linux in the middle term might develop into an proprietary Unix flavour with limited compatibility to the Linux mainstream. Out of that perspective, even for professional use a classical GNU/Linux system - if required with third-party support - seems to stay a competitive alternative to United Linux. (jlu)