UserLinux Releases First Beta

MohammedSameer writes "According to DesktopLinux, UserLinux has released their 1st beta CD, based on Debian. The project, led by the long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens, aims to provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options intended to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall costs."

User vs. Business

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if it's oriented to Businesses and support-conscious people, why is it called *User* Linux? Wouldn't BusinessLinux be more appropriate?

yet another distro?

[bwy]

Personally instead of seeing 100's of distros I'd like to see some serious work poured into maybe a handful of popular ones to make them more serious desktop contenders. There is a thin line between "choice" and "fragmentation".

Re:User vs. Business

[Bruce Perens]

It comes from user-supported, because anyone can participate in Debian, the development organization we base our system upon. So, if a user doesn't like something about the system, they have the ability to change it directly.

Bruce

Hmm...

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

I honestly don't think that the cost will have much of an effect on the success of this project. I mean, IT managers willingly pay $xxx to M$ for so much, anything remotely less than that is always a good deal. And then again, most people are apprehensive to the word free. Normally associating it with lower quality, hidden costs, etc. Honestly they could have charged $50 a licesnse, and it would probably increase its use. People like to pay for things they rely on, its just wierd.

Re:yet another distro?

[kundor]

Ah, you're missing the point.

The strength of OSS is that the more different projects, and the more users, the better, because the core programs and libraries that everybody uses have their bugs fixed, features added, and generalizations taken care of even faster.

It's not fragmentation, because all the work of the different distros migrates upstream and benefits the entire community.

And it's been made clear many a time that having a choice of OS's specialized to your needs makes for a more satisfying experience than a "one-size-fits-all" OS that tries to be all things for all people and ends up being mediocre at all of them.

Collective Yawn

[Ars-Fartsica]

Userlinux is an answer to a question no one was asking.

Re:Bruce, how about Canonical

[Bruce Perens]

Is that the outgrowth of KDE-Debian, or something else? Give me a URL.

Bruce

Re:yet another distro?

[archen]

You base that off of the assumption that people want to work on another distro when it many not meet their needs or goals. Some people work on a Linux distro because it's THEIRS, or they signifcantly contribute towards that distro's direction. You just aren't going to get that level of control or experimentation in Gentoo or Fedora. Probably 90% of Linux is concentrated in the top 10 distros (offical made up statistc!) anyway. Why stop at a handful? Why not go towards ONE distro for all?

Linux will come down to a handful of distros when everyone is actually happy with those distros. Those who try their hand at a new distro aren't just sitting on a mailing list bitching, they're actually working at making their own improvments their own way. And that's not such a bad thing either.

Re:Your forgot something.

[EightBits]

But that's ok. Riding on the work of others is done by everyone. Do you know Ohm's Law? If you do, did you develop it yourself? How about Calculus or, computers. Did you invent the microproccesor? If you are using these tools to make a living, then you are also riding on the effort of others. This is why humans form societies. It makes life easier for each individual and for the whole collective.

As for helping people, by merely helping linux grow in popularity in businesses willing to spend money on Linux, he is helping the linux community grow. Let's face it, while Linux can do just fine on it's own, it can do even better wth money. If I didn't have to worry about money, I would contribute a lot of time to Linux. So, if I can make money while helping Linux, both I and Linux win. By helping Linux in this way, the demand for Linux and Linux apps grows. The more this demand grows, the better the product will get due to more development. He IS helping the community and like everyone else, he is riding on the effort and work of others but still contributing to that effort and work.

Kernel Versions?

[JHillyerd]

I love Debian on servers, that's the one place where packages not changing often is a good thing.

One big frustration I have with debian-stable is that the kernel gets so far out of date, that it doesn't support newer hardware properly. Will UserLinux try to keep more up-to-date with kernel versions. I don't need bleeding edge, but 2.4.18 is two and half years old!

Don't tell me to use debian-testing, I've tried it and it replaces too many packages too often for a production machine.

Re:BUT...

[Mr. McGibby]

Simply because they are the only linux distros with HBA drivers

A lot of corporations don't even *use* SANs. Not every corporation needs em. Just because other distros lack a certain feature X doesn't mean that they're useless for corporations. That's just narrow minded thinking.

BTW, at my corporation, we use Gentoo because we know what we're doing and don't need or want the hand holding that RH and Suse provide. It's amazing! We're a corporation and we're successfully using a distro other than red hat and suse!

Re: Marketing Image

[Anonymous Coward]

I do agree that it should be called something like "Business Linux" or something similar. "UserLinux" just is not a well thought out name as far as marketing goes.

It may suprise you, but something as simple as a name can make a world of difference to business people, you know, the types that you want to purchase "UserLinux?"

Re:Hmm...

[4minus0]

Good points but the landscape with regards to budgeting is beginning to change. The company I work for does a mix of installations; fileservers, email, web...the usual. When given the choice, most businesses now like the sound of free.

It's basic economics...here's how we sell our open source services:
Companies are used to paying for a software license and support. It makes more sense to their bottom line to just pay for the support. Why pay more than you have to if somebody (in this case my company) will stand behind the product and support it?

Don't underestimate the power of free. We are beginning to deal with a lot of governmental type organizations (counties, city govts, etc) and they hate paying for a server license for Exchange, a CAL for the workstation and someone to support it. They simply do not have the funds for this kind of frivolous spending. If they aren't using the neat stuff of Exchange like shared calendars why not drop in a qmail|postfix|exim server and just pay for the support? Our backlog of contracts says that people will do that.

It comes down to this: the software is free for the taking...the support can either be absorbed in-house or outsourced, just like it always has.

Re:Human DDOS attack on Slashdot by Pruce Berens

[Slack3r78]

Heh, I noticed the same thing, and while it is amusing in a way, I'd also like the thank Bruce for doing so. Instead of lots of conjecture or half explanations, we're getting clear, thought out explanations directly from the source.

This tends to happen on Slashdot anyway (John Carmack in particular comes to mind) but seeing Bruce's name in just about every thread on this topic was impressive and I for one appreciate it. Thanks. :-)

Re:Collective Yawn

[Ars-Fartsica]

"where's the free-beer enterprise-grade Linux we've been expecting?"

See: Debian, White Box, Fedora Core 2, etc etc etc.

Re: Marketing Image

[Anonymous Coward]

I am attempting to appeal to the people who sit behind the computer. They do have some influence upon their management.

Personally, I think Linux already has strong support from those influencers of buying decisions. It's the other people who influence the buying decisions that need the handholding -- the risk management groups who want support -- the legal department with intellectual property concerns -- the marketing people who want to go to their users and brag about the infrastructure ("our product is built on .NET").

The guys behind the computer are already on your side for picking Debian as a core. The thing they'll appreciate you most for are if you help them sell Debian up in their organization.

IMHO Debian's biggest failing in the corporate world is in naming. While we use Debian Stable, with specific packages from Unstable, no marketing person in their right mind will go "buy our product because it's build on Debian Unstable technology".

On the other hand, I have had an experience where the California Highway Patrol was looking at a Windows product that I was selling, and was extremely interested to hear that it

"could run on Novell's ASP.NET implementation running on Novell's Linux".

Had I told them

"some mexican kid named Miguel's hobby is going up against microsoft and we'll run his stuff on Deb and Ian's Unstable OS."

I would have been a huge fan with the developers but got nowhere with the other, sometimes more important decision influencers.

Re:Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not! I'd like to see bittorrent used for many more legal downloads.

I'd encourage anyone with significant files to download to save their own bandwidth and costs and pass them down to the users. In a previous company we were paying about $30000/month for downloads of 10MB files. If we used torrents, I think everyone would have been happier.

Re:Kernel Versions?

[Macka]

Why would you need to change the kernel a year from now if you're still running on the same production hardware?

Re:I don't get it

[Bruce Perens]

Well, we need to certify to LSB, which we have not done yet. Then, we will pursue certification from proprietary application vendors and hardware manufacturers, because business people want that. We hope that people port their applications to LSB, not to UserLinux. The whole Linux world would be better for that.

Bruce

Not Just Another Distro

[Ashcrow]

Not true at all. UserLinux takes Debian and molds it into an easier to manage subset for buisness. Unlike RedHat and SuSE, support comes from a network who compete with eachother giving the user/company better prices and more choices. Since UserLinux had Debian roots, it is 100% compatable and offers all the packages Debian provides if the administrator so chooses to install them.

Ugh, Epiphany

[fred3666]

Mozilla Firefox is the future. They might as well base things around that now. I think even the Gnome team will abandon Epiphany development eventually. It is rather redundant, IMO.

Re:yet another distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your first arguement is a bit flawed. How many of those 15,000 packages will I really use or want to use? Of those, how many are not available in other distributions? The other distributions seem to offer everything I need. (Well except for RH's MP3 support but that's an easy fix.)

I ran into this arguement when debating with another engineer on which distribution to use at work. He favored Debian for this reason among others (he always listed this one first). I was advocating a distribution that offered commercial support and was a bit more proactive in incorporating new features (hardware support, interface design to ease management, etc.)

Never the less, congrats on the release. Glad to see you in the fray!

Re:I don't want to start a flame

[fmckee]

And since I have a long preference for KDE, UserLinux is an irrelevance for me.

Your relevance problem would be solved by installing KDE using apt-get. Nothing is preventing you from doing so.

Re: Marketing Image

[volkerdi]

It may suprise you, but something as simple as a name can make a world of difference to business people, you know, the types that you want to purchase "UserLinux?"

Plenty of people have said the same thing to me about "Slackware" over the years (at nearly every trade show), and at this point I'd have to concede that it hasn't made it any easier to sell it to the PHBs. They'd all feel much more comfortable running "Trustix" on the company servers. However, sysadmin types don't usually have any problem with "Slackware".

Name matters, and you have to think about who the name is going to appeal to. If your focus is business, it should appeal to the executives, the tech department, or both. I'm not sure the name "UserLinux" will accomplish this.

MD5 Please

[smurfnsanta]

I realize it's just an early Beta, but can we please always impose security first and insist on md5sum's? TIA from a big fan.

Re:User vs. Business

[Donny Smith]

As a person involved in selling enterprise Linux, support and consulting services, my feeling is that users who buy big quantities of enterprise Linux licenses for single (high performance computing) or few (ISPs) purposes stand to benefit most by chipping in some money to get User Linux certified for that one or two commercial apps they need.
Government and research centers belong to these categories.

Say a customer with 400 cluster nodes that pays $100/node for enterprise Linux every year - $40K from one such customer could be enough to pay for User Linux certification (as it's not total cross-OS porting, it shouldn't be outrageously expensive) of that single app they use.

The last and most expensive to certify will be h/w and s/w in data center - Oracle, SAN storage, etc. so those I guess will probably be the last to worry about.

re: userlinux

[bogie]

I keep seeing Bruce talk about how easy its going to be for outsiders to influence UserLinux which he says doesn't happen with Fedora. He may have a point that Fedora's direction is very much controlled by Red Hat but watch what happens in a few years once UserLinux becomes established. Mature projects are very difficult to bend to your whim or take in a new direction. Thus the many debian forks.

I also don't see how going negative on other distros is going to help your cause when commenting in public. Prove why your better with code, not somewhat negative marketing against Red Hat. You seem to be a bit Red Hat obessed and constantly mention them in the UnitedLinux white paper. I'd rather see why its better than Windows, Solaris, or OS X, not fellow OSS distros. Yes I know your trying to appeal to linux users first but great features sell themselves better than a negative comment anyday. And realize that future UserLinux users will pick up on your tone and intent. A year from now I don't think we all want to a bunch of UserLinux users Trolling against Red Hat and other distros constantly here and elsewhere.

I wish UserLinux the best of luck though and very much look forward to trying it out. It sounds like a great idea and is definitely needed. One more distro in the mix especially a Free one that caters to the business crowd specifically is fine by me.

Re:Let us hope this does not go the knoppix route

[rick_qcs]

knoppix has done more to bring windows users to debian than apt-get.

Re:Userlinux is weird

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that it was a gamble. I simply believe they lost, that's all. The usability study open which this was based was quite flawed on a number of grounds, only one of which is that the "spatial logic" of where to place buttons only makes sense if the only reason the user is clicking the button is to make the dialog go away. In other words, annoying informational messages (usually single-button anyway) and annoying wizards. It pretty much went into the dialog discussion trying to answer the question "what's the fastest way to make this dialog go away?" instead of "what's the best way to communicate information to the user and get a response that reflects the intent of the user?"

There's a lot in the HIG to like. They say "label those buttons with meaningful labels, not just OK and Cancel" which is great to see (and arguably more necessary because if the buttons are all switched around, you need to label them more clearly). But the simple fact is that natural language order pre-dated Windows. It goes back to the very first graphical and linedrawing-based apps. It was settled, and no users complained that there was a problem (unlike when Windows moved the "close" button to the upper-right corner and users suddenly started accidentally closing apps they meant to resize). User complaints about button order just plain didn't exist. Apple commissioned a usability study, and while there are good things about usability studies, every now and then you find usability specialists changing things that are already fine in order to justify their commission. Case in point: Exactly how much easier are microwave ovens getting after all of the "usability" improvements?

When someone says "I just want to cook this for 30 seconds, does that mean I should hit "Reheat" or "Popcorn"?!?" I think to myself, "This is usability gone horribly wrong." The makers of this microwave would certainly say "But we did a study! People respond quicker to task-oriented buttons!"

The fact that there was a study, I guess my point is, is meaningless if the study is crap to begin with. I and many other Linux users would have no problem using Gnome if it weren't for the button-order problem. But as it stands, the Gnome HIG created two camps of Linux users that can never be reconciled--where previously there had only been one group in complete agreement. And for Linux users to agree about ANYTHING is amazing--but they did in fact all agree about button order once upon a time.

It's fine to disagree. Disagreement is good. But somehow this strikes me as more of a manufactured difference of opinion than one that would have naturally occurred if the Apple study had never occurred.

Re:yet another distro?

[nutshell42]

15,000 packages in one repository with no cross-dependency issues. 3 times Red Hat, 5 times SuSE.

Yeah, and stable's packages are only a few years out of date while unstable not only *has* dependency issues quite often but is also slower than the update services of the other distributions most times (kdeaddons is still 3.2.3 weeks after 3.3 and weeks after most of the other kde packages got upgraded and it breaks a number of features, great)

11 architectures (12 if you count AMD64, which will not be "official" for this release but exists and runs fine).

I think most of your customers could agree on 5 or 6 of that architectures that noone needs and would prefer a supported amd64 instead. Apart from that even x86 is really, really slow in releasing - I never actually followed release schedules for the rest but isn't it even worse for some of the more exotic architectures?

Over 1000 active developers. One of the largest Open Source projects.

You should think they'd find some people doing builds on time then

More than 10 years of successful history. It's older than RH or SuSE.

It's not. SuSE was founded end 1992, Redhat in 1993, Debian in August 1993 IIRC.

I like Debian for a number of reasons but a lot of things are really dumb perhaps you can change some of them. (changing the attitude of the people in the #debian channel on freenode would be a good start =) Every time I have a question I get a "why would you want to do that" then some ridiculing or it's simply ignored then I join the gentoo chan or some other and most times get a helpful answer. I wonder why I still bother with #debian)

Re:Torrent

[Daengbo]

This was the real motivation behind the invention of BitTorrent, if I remember reading the writer's discussion of it on Slashdot a couple of years ago, when it was still vaporware. He wanted to save on bandwidth costs for FTP servers.