The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - Ch. 22, by Dr. Peter Salus
by Pamela Jones
Groklaw
November 24 2005
Here's the next installment of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, Chapter 22, "Yet More Peguins," by Dr. Peter Salus. It is the last for about a month, after which Dr. Salus will begin again. Earlier chapters can be found here [ http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051013231901859 ].Debian Linux, as I stated in Chapter 20, was created by Ian Murdock. He officially founded the "Project" on August 16, 1993. From November 1994 to November 1995, the Debian Project was sponsored by the FSF.
In November 1995, Infomagic released an experimental version of Debian which was only partially in ELF format as "Debian 1.0." On December 11, Debian and Infomagic jointly announced that this release "was screwed." Bruce Perens, who had succeeded Murdock as "leader," said that the data placed on the 5-CD set would most likely not even boot possibly.
The real result was that the "real" release, Buzz, was 1.1 (June 17, 1996), with 474 packages. Bruce was employed by Pixar and so all Debian releases are named after characters in Toy Story (1995).
Though Debian carried the burden of being tough to install for several years, Sarge has changed that. The new installer with automatic hardware detection is quite remarkable.
I introduced Red Hat in Chapter 19, and I will return to the company again, but at this point I'd like to introduce Mandrake, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat 5.1 and KDE. It was created by Gael Duval, a graduate of Caen University, in July 1998. From 1998 to early 2004, Mandrake was reasonably successful, notable for its high degree of internationalization as well as the variety of chips it would run on. However, in February 2004 MandrakeSoft lost a suit filed by the Hearst Syndicate which claimed invasion of their trademarked "Mandrake the Magician." Starting with 10.0, there was a minor name change. Then, in April 2005, Mandrakesoft announced that there was a merger with Conectiva, and that the new name would be Mandriva.
Joseph Cheek founded Redmond Linux in 2000. In 2001 it merged with DeepLinux. In January 2002 the company was renamed Lycoris and its Desktop/LX was based on Caldera's Workstation 3.1. In June 2005, Lycoris was acquired by Mandriva.
I've gone through all this to show just how complex the tale of Linux distributions can be. And, as of this writing, there appear to be well over 100 distributions. I will neither enumerate nor elaborate on most of them. However, the most "popular" appear to be:
It might be a full-time job to track all the distributions and their origins. For instance, Kanotix is a Debian derivative. It is also a Knoppix derivative, as it is a live CD. And it is solid as a rock.
Knoppix was created by Klaus Knopper, a freelance IT/Linux consultant. It has achieved popularity because it is easily run from the CD, without installation and because it can be readily employed to fix corrupted file systems, etc. It was the first Linux on a live CD.
In 1996, Bob Young and Red Hat moved corporate headquarters to North Carolina. In January 1997, Greylock and August Capital invested $6.25 million in Cygnus Solutions, becoming the first VCs to invest in a free software business. In July, Red Hat 4.2 was released and in December, 5.0 was announced.
These are important events, as could be seen in November 1998 when a Microsoft lawyer waved a Red Hat box in the air to "refute" the US Justice Department charge that Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop operating system market.
While Red Hat may not have been the most innovative company, they had already become the iconic Linux enterprise.
In August of 1999, Red Hat had its IPO, the eighth largest first day gain in Wall Street history. (On 9 December 1999, VA Linux had its IPO.) And in November 1999, Red Hat acquired Cygnus, creating the largest "open source" company in the world.
Just how successful Linux and some Linux companies had become was made obvious at the outset of the new millennium:
Oh, boy!
Dr. Salus is the author of "A Quarter Century of UNIX" [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201547775/103-4901303-9037417?v=glance ] and several other books [ http://www.computerbooks01.com/search/books/AuthorSearch/Peter+H.+Salus/1/ ], including "HPL: Little Languages and Tools", "Big Book of Ipv6 Addressing Rfcs", "Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Imperative Programming Languages", "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond", and "The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Functional, Concurrent and Logic Programming Languages". There is an interview with him, audio and video,"codebytes: A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences" [ http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=583 ] which was done in 2001 at a USENIX conference. Dr. Salus has served as Executive Director of the USENIX Association.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
11:55 AM EST
Copyright 2005 http://www.groklaw.net/ - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/