As I write this, there’s buzz going around (again) that Larry Ellison (who looks remarkably similar to Lex Luthor’s evil, megalomaniacal dad on Smallville) and his legion of robots are planning to release come out with a Linux disribution, presumably as the premier platform for running Oracle 10g. Great! Just what we need — another Linux distribution.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for diversity in the Linux landscape. I think there’s room for a good, say, half-dozen parent distros and a handful of offspring to fit the needs of everyone who wants to run Linux. Red Hat, SuSE Linux Enterprise (and their open source alter-egos, Fedora, CentOS, and OpenSUSE), Debian and Ubuntu (and those derivatives, such as MEPIS, Linspire, and Xandros, plus all the cool “Live CD” utility-things), plus Mandriva should completely — and I mean completely — fit the bill for the entire community. Throw in Gentoo for those lunatics that want to build everything from source, and that’s all the world really needs.
Now, I can understand why Oracle might think that spinning its own distribution is a good idea, because let’s face it, a Linux that was pre-loaded or optimized for Oracle 10g would be nice. Oracle isn’t the easiest software to install on Linux because it requires a whole bunch of manual configuration file tweaks to get it to run right, and I think some better integration with the operating…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
