Sunday, July 10, 2005
Sources close to three distributors of the GNU/Linux operating systems have announced that Progeny, Mandriva and TurboLinux are working together on a new Enterprise Linux distribution in the hope of competing with Novell’s and Red Hat’s products.
The new distribution will be Debian-based, making it the first Debian-based enterprise Linux distribution. According to eWeek.com, the distribution will support both Debian’s native .deb package format (including APT) and Red Hat’s original RPM system, in order to remain compatible with the many Red Hat-based enterprise distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE – according to one vendor, “Basically the objective is to produce a distro that can act like Debian, use the Debian repository, but any Red Hat engineer should be comfortable with it.” The distribution will also include a (within Debian) pioneering Web-based service manager for easy system administration, comparable to RHEL’s tools of late.