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News and Editorials

Unbreakable Linux vs. Unfakeable Linux

It was just about a year ago that Oracle announced its Unbreakable Linux offering. There was considerable speculation (here and here) on Oracle's motives for offering support for a Linux distribution that was essentially recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat countered this campaign with its own Unfakeable Linux campaign. The move seemed to many to be designed to undercut Red Hat's business. Oddly, to me at least, there was very little speculation about where Oracle would get their Linux sources if they did manage to impact Red Hat's business.

Fast forward one year, Linux-Watch takes a look at how Unbreakable Linux is diverging from its parent, mostly through the addition of packages such as the Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP and Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool). These additions leave the original source code untouched. Linux-Watch quotes Oracle Vice President of Linux Engineering Wim Coekaerts: ""Oracle Enterprise Linux is compatible with RHEL and what we do is provide a great support service on top of either or both. We didn't launch a Linux distribution business; we started a Linux support program. I think we have made that very clear many times.""

CentOS contributor Dag Wieers doesn't agree that Unbreakable Linux is still compatible with Unfakeable Linux (RHEL). "Another well-hidden fact of Oracle's promotional buzz is that you cannot both be compatible with RHEL, and provide bugfixes and improvements. Either you make changes, or you stay compatible with the original. So whatever Oracle stated was self-contradictory. All the articles at the time failed to mention that, riding on Oracle's wave."

Dag also notes (in a comment below the post) that "YaST does not work on top of the OS, it cuts into most of the sysadmin tasks and often breaks config-files that have been handcrafted. YaST actually requires that start-up scripts and /etc/sysconfig-files are heavily modified."

Perhaps Oracle is introducing some incompatibility, but if Oracle's Unbreakable Linux diverges too much from the Unfakeable RHEL, Oracle loses. Oracle is not in the Linux Distribution business, nor does it want to be. Oracle does need a dependable platform that works well with its database products and Red Hat provides that platform. Oracle's Linux customers may not always know if a problem they have is in Oracle's database or somewhere in the OS. Why should they need to know that? One call to Oracle puts that problem in Oracle's lap, where it belongs. Oracle's Linux business is firmly tied to Red Hat's business now, and Oracle will suffer if Red Hat falters.

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New Releases

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, has been released. Gutsy contains many new packages including X.org 7.3, GNOME 2.20, the newly merged Compiz/Beryl and lots more. More information can be found by clicking below.

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Damn Small Linux 4.0 released

Damn Small Linux 4.0 has been released. The announcement contains a change log which notes an upgraded kernel from 2.4.26 to 2.4.31, new support modules: cloop, unionfs, ndiswrapper, fuse, and madwifi in support of kernel change and much more.

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Distribution News

Mandriva Linux

The Mandriva Club is now open to all Linux users for free

The new Mandriva Club has been announced. "The Mandriva Club offers content and services for Mandriva Linux users, including: * a news feed with community articles and interviews * a knowledge base, with tips & tricks and a special zone for Linux newcomers * the RPM farm service for an easy access to online application packages and repositories * Bittorrent downloads with access to the final versions a few days before the release for early seeders * the official documentation * a personal blog service for community members * a nice e-cards service for the holiday season * access to a complete e-training program, with 25 free training modules * access to the Mandriva Expert support platform * an HCL database."

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New Distributions

elpicx

elpicx is a live DVD Linux system that will help you prepare for the exams of the Linux Professional Institute Certification Program LPIC. elpicx 1.1 Dual-Boot-DVD (based on Knoppix 5.1.1 and CentOS 4.3) is the current version. Supported languages are German and English.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 106

The Fedora Weekly News for October 15, 2007 contains Ask Fedora, some Planet Fedora articles, marketing discussions, developments, the Fedora Board Recap, open fonts, and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #62

Ubuntu Weekly News #62 is out, covering the release of Gutsy, the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Dell shipping Gutsy on desktops and laptops, and much more. Click below to read the issue.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 225

The DistroWatch Weekly for October 22, 2007 is out. "It is dedicated to the recently released Mandriva Linux 2008, with a first look review at Mandriva's latest release, an interview with the company's Director of Engineering, and a brief note comparing the new releases from the traditional European Linux power houses - Mandriva and openSUSE. In the news section, Canonical releases impressive "Gutsy Gibbon", Fedora mulls development changes, KDE reaches its third beta, and Slackware updates Current branch. Finally, for those of you who enjoy the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics, don't miss the Site News section, which summarises a brief experiment that took place on the web site last week. It's a bumper issue, so get yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy the read!"

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Distribution meetings

FOSDEM call for talks for the Debian devroom

Debian will have a devroom at FOSDEM 2008, February 23-24, 2008 in Brussels, Belgium. "Since that's "only" about four months from now, I'm hereby calling for talks. As usual, the deadline is "when my schedule is full", and talks that have a subject matter which involves Debian and which are appropriate for FOSDEM, given its somewhat technical background, will be accepted on a first come, first serve basis."

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Miscellaneous Articles

Yellow Dog Linux - PS3 user featured in Wired Magazine

Terra Soft has pointed out this Wired article about the work of Yellow Dog Linux user and HPC Consortium member Dr. Gaurav Khanna. "As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place."

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Interviews

Interview with Chitlesh Goorah on Fedora Electronics Lab

Chitlesh Goorah talks about the Fedora Electronics Lab. "At the very beginning, there was neither the intention for a Fedora Electronic Lab nor its spin. During my post-graduate studies in Micro-Nano Electronic Engineering, I needed VLSI simulation tools. I started packaging the VLSI simulation tools for Fedora, which I needed for my studies. Then MirjamWaeckerlin and my lecturers in Strasbourg, France, encouraged the concept of introducing Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Design Flows on Fedora, so that they can recommend to other students or use those tools themselves."

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Distribution reviews

Battle of the Titans: Mandriva 2008 vs openSUSE 10.3 (TuxMachines)

TuxMachines compares Mandriva 2008.0 and openSUSE 10.3. "I've followed development of openSUSE and Mandriva fairly closely over the years, albeit a bit closer of openSUSE. I write about how nice they both are. I pick out the new features and test basic functionality. I see what's included and what makes up the base system. I like them both. But a visitor and contributor here at tuxmachines asked which would be better for his laptop and that gave me the idea to compare these large multi-CD Titans of Linux development. In the blue corner weighing in at 4.3 GB, Mandriva 2008.0. In the green corner weighing in at 4.2 GB, openSUSE 10.3."

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What's New in Ubuntu 7.10? (O'ReillyNet)

Brian DeLacey reviews Ubuntu 7.10, a.k.a. Gutsy Gibbon, on O'Reilly's ONLamp site. "Ubuntu 7.10 adds highly attractive user interface elements with the inclusion of Compiz Fusion technology. This is instantly cool demo-ware. If you want to get a sense of what this functionality can do, visit Google Video and you will find impressively choreographed demonstrations by virtuosos of Compiz Fusion demonstrating their jazz of "Advanced Desktop Effects." Not only do these interface improvements look nice, but they can also help you productively manage multiple desktops and workspaces with numerous 3D effects. These have been wish list items for some time, and they have finally arrived. These effects require newer video cards for you to get the full benefit, but they degrade gracefully on older hardware lacking the required graphics horsepower."

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'Vixta' Linux distro mimics Vista's look and feel (apc)

apc reviews Vixta, a Fedora-based distribution that is modeled after Windows Vista. "I don't know if Linus Torvalds has nightmares about Linux turning into Windows but some people definitely do. Linux Doesn't Need to Look Like Windows has been a popular and oft-visited article about Vixta on reddit since last week. It had spurred about 100 comments going back and forth about the merit of Vixta's user interface design and whether Linux should look like Windows."

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