UnitedLinux Releases Version 1.0

Industry Leading Technology Providers Sponsor Launch Event

Las Vegas — 11/19/2002 — Today the UnitedLinux group announced the release of Version 1.0 of its UnitedLinux product, a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. UnitedLinux is the result of an industry initiative to streamline Linux development and certification around a global, uniform distribution of Linux. Founding companies of UnitedLinux are Linux industry leaders Conectiva S.A., The SCO Group (NASDAQ:SCOX), SUSE LINUX AG, and Turbolinux, Inc. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 is the engine that powers products to be sold by the four companies, each with its own local language support, value-add features, and pricing.

Sponsors of the UnitedLinux 1.0 launch event are HP (NYSE:HPQ) and IBM (NYSE:IBM). Today's announcement was made during the UnitedLinux press conference at the COMDEX event in Las Vegas.

"UnitedLinux has successfully reached its first major milestone by delivering Version 1.0 according to the schedule laid out last spring when the group was formed," said Paula Hunter, general manager of UnitedLinux. "Today's launch of UnitedLinux Version 1.0 is a tribute to the collaborative skills and technical expertise of the four founding companies, as well as to the vision that brought the UnitedLinux organization into being."

Built on top of a solid and tested foundation, UnitedLinux 1.0 is an enterprise-class operating system with exceptional stability, scalability and reliability, and its high level of quality has been previously available only in expensive proprietary operating systems. Distributed virtually everywhere in the world and supported by leading global ISVs and IHVs, UnitedLinux Version 1.0 will initially be available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French and Hungarian. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 will have local language and local time zone support for customers around the world, with access to a channel of more than 16,000 resellers and a global pre- and post-sales support team. Details of global training and certification programs will be made public in the near future.

"As the leading provider of industry-standard Linux hardware and a long time proponent of open-source computing, HP believes in offering our customers the choice to deploy Linux across the platforms that best meet their individual computing needs," said Rick Becker, HP Vice President, Software CTO, Industry Standard Servers. "With the delivery of UnitedLinux Version 1.0 we are able to offer our customers, across the world, additional choice and flexibility, enabling them to deploy the best Linux solution for their business."

"Customers want to rapidly deploy Linux-based applications to realize business value, and ISVs want a common, reliable, standards based platform upon which to build their applications," said Steve Solazzo, General Manager, Linux, IBM. "Today's delivery of UnitedLinux Version 1.0, right on schedule, simplifies the tasks for application providers and customers alike, allowing them to more rapidly deploy Linux solutions with confidence."

UnitedLinux Version 1.0 incorporates a wide range of features that enhance its usefulness for enterprise environments. Details are contained in a UnitedLinux white paper at http://www.unitedlinux.com/. Some highlights are:

• Standards compliance: UnitedLinux support for key community standards, such as LSB 1.2 and OpenI18N from the Free Standards group, allows broader hardware and software vendor support as well as adoption by large enterprises with heterogeneous IT shops. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 has met the stringent requirements of LSB certification.
   
• Scalability: Enterprise server configurations continue to grow, with larger, more powerful multi-processors handling more users, tasks and threads. Enhancements in UnitedLinux improve Linux's ability to take advantage of larger and more complex systems and thus handle new categories of applications. Specifics include:
  • Complete set of software and tools to build server farms, for workloads that would otherwise be unmanageable for a single machine
  • Scheduler enhancements to improve process scheduling on SMPs and avoid the scheduler becoming a bottleneck
  • Asynchronous Input/Output, to minimize waiting on I/O in large, busy systems
     
• High Availability: As Linux has grown from early applications into more business-critical areas, the availability expectations of users have grown as well. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 bolsters Linux's capabilities in avoiding downtime and in diagnosing and fixing problems when they do occur. New capabilities include:
  • A flexible and powerful POSIX-compliant event logging and notification capability
  • Dynamic probes that greatly enhance profiling and debugging, and allow dynamic insertion of breakpoints in code
  • Non-disruptive and tailored dumping of system data
  • Toolkit that significantly improves Linux's ability to record and trace system events
  • Hotplug PCI support, enabling the addition or removal of attached devices without system restart
     
• Security: UnitedLinux 1.0 improves Linux's suitability for sectors where security is critical, by offering support for Kerberos, a strong network authentication protocol; basic firewall support to separate secure areas of the system from less restricted areas; and a consolidated set of community security enhancements known as Bastille.
   
• File Systems: As the data needs of enterprise users continue to grow, the demands on the underlying file system(s) have grown as well. UnitedLinux addresses this issue by including support for the Journaling File System (JFS), which is an extremely scalable, stable, and high throughput filesystem, and the popular community filesystems Reiser File System (ReiserFS), XFS, and the ext3 filesystem.
   
• Network/storage/device management: As Linux becomes more widely used, the numbers and types of devices that users need continue to grow. In addition, enterprise customers expect their device drivers to be robust, and network protocols continue to evolve. In addition to basic IPv6 support, UnitedLinux 1.0 meets these challenges by supporting Logical Volume Manager (LVM), a popular community volume manager, and Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS), a layered, plug-in means of providing exceptional flexibility and extensibility in managing storage. Device drivers supported include Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Token Ring, ODBC, Tape, SCSI, among others.
   
• Platform support and interoperability: For the foreseeable future, enterprises will depend on a heterogeneous computing environment. UnitedLinux Version 1.0 takes advantage of hardware capability across all relevant platforms and architectures, including Intel (32 and 64-bit), AMD, PowerPC (IBM eServer iSeries and pSeries), and IBM eServer zSeries mainframe. Hardware functionality is exploited through advanced features such as large memory support for up to 64 GB of RAM, hardware technology for compressing main memory contents called Memory Expansion Technology (MXT), and graphical connection support.
   
• Development Environment: UnitedLinux 1.0 provides a development environment for ISVs that includes all the compilers, includes, libraries, sources, text editors, graphical user interface support and other tools to enable the building of applications for UnitedLinux.

Products powered by UnitedLinux are being offered by the four founding companies. Details are available on request from
Conectiva S. A. - unitedlinux@conectiva.com
The SCO Group - unitedlinux@sco.com
SUSE LINUX AG - unitedlinux@suse.com
Turbolinux, Inc. - unitedlinux@turbolinux.com

About UnitedLinux

UnitedLinux is a partnership of industry-leading Linux companies combining their intellectual property, geographic mind share, sales, support and marketing expertise to produce a uniform distribution of Linux designed for business. UnitedLinux applies the collaborative development model of open source to the business model to enable a one-stop shop for developers, partners and customers to install, support and maintain quality business solutions based on Linux anywhere in the world. UnitedLinux is actively recruiting membership for both industry software developers and those who provide Linux as an integral part of their business solutions. For more information, visit http://www.unitedlinux.com/ or call UnitedLinux at +1-781-876-8989.