[2247] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Linux Athena questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Sun Oct 18 13:16:42 1998
To: Salvatore Valente <svalente@MIT.EDU>
Cc: tb@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
From: amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Date: 18 Oct 1998 13:16:28 -0400
In-Reply-To: Salvatore Valente's message of "Sun, 18 Oct 1998 01:42:35 -0400 (EDT)"
Here's a more detailed, but still slightly simplified, take on the
history of Linux(-Athena):
In the beginning, there was the Kernel, which started out as a way for
Linus to teach himself 386 protected-mode programming. As other
developers wrote and ported other free software, Linux evolved into a
vaguely complete system. However, I think anyone who wanted to use it
then had to scavenge various bits and pieces from all over. Since
that required more effort and clue than some would-be users wanted to
put in, various people started putting together distributions they
could readily install.
The earliest distribution of any significance was known as Soft
Landing Systems (SLS), which came as a set of disk images users could
install. For some reason I don't recall, SLS stagnated and died, so
some other people created a similar distribution and called it
Slackware, which I guess was the best distribution in its day for many
users; it certainly seems to have dominated the market for a while.
Now, Slackware suffered from some problems which I believe it still
has: releases often had all sorts of stupid bugs or security holes
which the maintainers didn't bother to fix quickly, and its packaging
system (if one could even call it that) was extremely minimal. Some
other developers therefore decided to produce their own distributions
addressing some or all of those problems.
In particular, some developers in North Carolina decided to form Red
Hat Software and go into business marketing their own distribution,
which became the next distribution to attract a significant US
following. Red Hat Linux had major advantages over Slackware; in
particular, it had a pretty decent packaging system (Red Hat Package
Manager [RPM]) and *much* more active maintainers, who were generally
quick to introduce packages solving significant problems.
The third major US player is Debian, which is maintained by a
relatively open group of volunteers across the Internet. Debian
matured later than Red Hat, but now that it has, I've heard it has a
nicer packaging system (dpkg) and less lame maintainers, but may be
harder for inexperienced users to maintain.
As Sal said, Red Hat is certainly sufficient, especially if you don't
care about the ease of modifying it or running a lot of libc5-based
software on Red Hat 5.x; it's just starting to lag wrt Debian.
Unfortunately, there are generally no good cross-distribution upgrade
paths; if there wre, I would probably have pushed for basing the
upcoming Linux-Athena release on Debian 2.0 rather than Red Hat 5.1.
Oh, one other thing: I'd say libc major version changes have been
closer to once every two years than once every year, at least
lately...I've been using Linux for close to four years now and been
through two libc major version changes.
--
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC <amu@mit.edu> (finger amu@monk.mit.edu)
