The project also represents the companies' plan for competing with Red Hat, the most popular Linux distribution. By uniting behind a common Linux code base, they hope to make up a collective customer and developer base that's large enough to prevent Red Hat from becoming the de facto Linux flavor.

UnitedLinux 1.0 serves as the engine powering products sold by the respective companies. They add their own local language support and additional features and can set their own pricing.

The operating system complies with Linux community standards such as LSB 1.2 and OpenI18N to ensure broad hardware and software vendor support and to help large enterprises with heterogeneous IT environments work with UnitedLinux.

Highlights for this release include the following enterprise features:

• Scalability: Enhancements in UnitedLinux lets the software take advantage of large, complex systems. It includes software and tools for building server farms that can handle workloads a single machine couldn't support. Improvements to the scheduler enhance process scheduling on SMPs and ensure the scheduler doesn't become a bottleneck, the companies say. In addition, synchronous Input/Output helps minimize waiting on I/O in large, busy systems.
• Improved "uptime": The software improves Linux's capabilities in avoiding downtime and in diagnosing and fixing problems when they do occur. For example, there's new POSIX-compliant event logging and notification capability. Dynamic probes improve profiling and debugging and support dynamic insertion of breakpoints in code. There's non-disruptive and tailored dumping of system data, and a new toolkit that lets you record and trace system events. Finally, hotplug PCI support lets you add and restart attached devices without restarting the system.
• Security: Updates in this area include support for the Kerberos network authentication protocol, basic firewall support to separate secure areas of the system from less restricted areas, and a consolidated set of security enhancements from the open source community known as Bastille.
• File systems: To help meet the heavy data needs of enterprise users, UnitedLinux supports the Journaling File System (JFS) -- a scalable, high-throughput file system -- as well as the community files systems Reiser File System (ReiserFS), XFS, and ext3.
• Network/storage/device management: UnitedLinux 1.0 supports basic IPv6, as well as Logical Volume Manager (a community volume manager) and Enterprise Volume Management System (a layered, plug-in for managing storage). Supported device drivers include Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Token Ring, ODBC, Tape, and SCSI.
• Platform support: This release is designed for heterogeneous computing environments, the companies say. It supports Intel (32 and 64-bit), AMD, PowerPC (IBM eServer iSeries and pSeries), and IBM eServer zSeries mainframes.
• Development environment: UnitedLinux 1.0 includes a development environment for software developers and vendors. It includes compilers, libraries, sources, text editors, graphical user interface support, and other tools for building UnitedLinux applications.