developerWorks: Inside UnitedLinux

“UnitedLinux was announced earlier this year with a bold promise
of a November release date. Well, November is here and the good
news is that the promise is being realized–UnitedLinux 1.0 is
here. The big question now is, will it fly?

“This article was written over the course of the four weeks
prior to closure of the UnitedLinux 1.0 product, when much of the
external working of the final product matured and came into shape.
While this article is about UnitedLinux, the commercial form in
which it will be available may vary considerably across the four
partners: Conectiva, SCO, SuSE, and Turbolinux. During the Beta and
Release Candidate period the UnitedLinux component CDs–those
containing the base components of the operating system–were
bootable and capable of controlling the installation of the
product. Since then, due to a mixture of events, licensing
constraints, and other legalities and arrangements, it has become
necessary to obtain from the installer an acknowledgement of
license compliance. It was therefore decided that, for SCO Linux
4.0 (powered by UnitedLinux 1.0) at least, only the vendor CD will
be able to control product installation. This article is therefore
based on SCO Linux 4.0 as a product.

“Each vendor incorporates its own ‘value add’ to create the
commercial products. SuSE, for example, will release its product as
SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 8.0 (powered by UnitedLinux). But
remember that the core components will be identical across the
UnitedLinux distributions–the packages are physically identical
and the installed product will be certified as UnitedLinux 1.0.
Confusing? Not really, if you focus on the essence of the message
‘certified consistency…'”

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