Datasheet

ultimately feed back into the next release of the commercial SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Red Hat and
Novell are usually considered to be the two big commercial Linux vendors in the marketplace.
For more information about Novell and SuSE, see
www.novell.com. The OpenSUSE project has a sepa-
rate website,
www.opensuse.org.
Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux
Debian has been around for as long as Red Hat and SuSE and has a large group of core supporters. As
an entirely community-maintained distribution, it is not motivated by the goals of any one particular
corporation but strives simply to advance the state of the art. This is a laudable goal indeed, though
Debian has suffered in the past from extremely large development cycles—often many years between
major releases. A variety of “Debian derivatives” have been produced in the past, including Progeny
Linux, which was one of the first attempts at producing a commercial version of Debian.
Mark Shuttleworth, one-time founder of Thwate made a fortune developing a business that had some
reliance on Debian systems. Thus, he was heavily involved in the Debian community, and in 2004
founded the Ubuntu project. Ubuntu is based upon Debian, but it doesn’t aim to replace it. Rather, the
goal of the Ubuntu project is to provide stable release cycles and productize Debian into a distribution
for the masses. Canonical, the company backing Ubuntu development has developed various tools as
part of this process, including the Launchpad and Rosetta tools mentioned later in this book.
For more information about Debian GNU/Linux, see
www.debian.org. The Ubuntu project has a sepa-
rate website,
www.ubuntulinux.org.
Classes of Linux Distribution
Distributions can be broadly broken down into three different classes, depending upon their goals,
whether they are a derivative of another popular distribution, and whether they are designed for ease of
use or for those with more advanced requirements. For example, the average desktop user is unlikely to
rebuild his or her entire Linux distribution on a whim, whereas some server administrators actively enjoy
the power and flexibility of squeezing every last possible drop of performance out of their machines.
It’s important to remember that Linux delivers great flexibility — if someone can think of a way to use
Linux and create a new distribution, somebody else is probably already working on implementing it.
RPM based Distributions
RPM-based distributions are so called because they use Red Hat’s RPM package management tools in
order to package and distribute the individual components of the distribution. In early fall 1995, RPM
was one of the first package management tools available for Linux. It was quickly adopted by other dis-
tributions, such as SuSE Linux. RPM has since been renamed from Red Hat Package Manager to RPM
Package Manager — reflecting the independent development of the RPM tools happening today—but a
number of distributions using RPM continue to share commonalities with Red Hat distributions.
RPM-based distributions such as Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell’s SuSE Linux
Enterprise Server (SLES) make up a bulk of commercial Linux offerings used throughout the world
today. If you’re writing software for use in the enterprise, you’ll want to ensure that you have support
for RPM-based distributions such as these. You needn’t buy a copy of the Enterprise version of these
distributions simply for everyday software development. Instead, you can use one of the community-
maintained releases of the Fedora (Red Hat Linux derived) or OpenSuSE Linux distributions.
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Chapter 1: Working with Linux
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