New Enterprise Linux distribution on the horizon

July 10, 2005

Sources close to three distributors of the GNU/Linux operating systems have announced that, and  are working together on a new Enterprise Linux distribution in the hope of competing with 's and Red Hat's products.

The new distribution will be, making it the first Debian-based enterprise Linux distribution. According to , the distribution will support both Debian's native .deb package format (including ) and Red Hat's original system, in order to remain compatible with the many Red Hat-based enterprise distributions such as  (RHEL) and  — 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.