John, There's already a company doing this. They just haven't made themselves that well known to this mailing list. Information Technology Company at http://www.p390.com/linux.html says "ITC's distribution of Linux for S/390 is expressly built for VM and VSE sites looking to leverage Linux's strengths quickly with minimal time and effort. All of the popular Internet and web based open-source applications are already preinstalled, tested and ready to run "right out of the box". Minimal customization and configuration is required. All current maintenance has been applied and tested to the Linux kernel.
"IBM S/390 specific device drivers and modules are pre-built and included in the distribution so VM and VSE sites can begin to use Linux immediately. Drivers and modules include IUCV and CTC (channel to channel) adapters for very high speed network communications between Linux images, the 3215 and 3270 console devices, and z/VM minidisk drivers. "ITC's Linux for S/390 is delivered on a standard S/390 media (3490 tape cartridge or CD-ROM) in familiar DASD DDR format allowing for straightforward and simple installation. "Under VM/ESA or z/VM, the ITC Linux for S/390 distribution kernel is supplied as an IPL-able named saved system to speed and simplify the Linux boot process. This insures that one (or more) standard Linux configurations are available to Linux guest at all times." To answer the other questions you raised, you are free to redistribute anything that is covered by the GPL, or similar license that meets the OSI definition of Open Source. (Some licenses are more relaxed about certain aspects of redistribution than the GPL, such as the BSD license.) The interesting part about the GPL is that are you are free to charge whatever fee you can get others to pay for this redistributed package. The fact that anyone can get it themselves by burning up bandwidth limits what that amount that can realistically be, but in theory there's no ceiling. If you want to get it from someone else, ITC is the only company I'm aware of doing that today. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: McKown, John [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 9:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Stupid idea? I've seen a number of posts here about installing Linux/390 "from scratch". Many people want ISO images. Most vendors seem to supply files, such as RPMs and you do an install like you would on a PC (more or less). Why doesn't some nice distro make a "starter" set of VM minidisks, and back them up with DDR or DFDSS and make those files available? Probably wouldn't help the people installing in LPAR mode, but for those of us who will be running under z/VM (when it finally gets here), this would be a nice "value added" feature. I'm not saying for 0 cost, but for a "reasonable" cost. And if it could be on a 3490E tape, that would be even nicer for us mainframe dinos. Also, what are the restrictions on redistributation? Let's say that my company gets SuSe or RH Linux/390. We install it and customize it. Could we then use, as above, some disk backup program to unload the DASD to tape and let another installation restore our Linux/390? I know that we couldn't do that if there were OEM products from, say CA, or Oracle, or IBM on the tapes. But what about a "Debian" type distributation - i.e. all free/GNU/GPL'ed software? Just an idle thought. And we know what an idle mind is (the devil's workshop). -- John McKown
