Linux Online - Progeny's plans could make Linux distros interchangeable

Progeny's plans could make Linux distros interchangeable


Publication:	Newsforge	Date:	Dec 04 2003

Progeny, which calls itself "The Linux Platform Company," has made a Debian port of Red Hat's Anaconda installer. Progeny is also continuing its work on Discover, an XML-based utility that may revolutionize the way Linux detects hardware and loads kernel modules or other drivers. None of this work is immediately visible to end users, says Progeny Director of Technology John Daily, but these open source projects, and others Progeny is supporting, have the potential to make Linux easier to administer for everyone from high-end enterprise sysadmins to home users who only use their computers for simple office tasks.

Some of this goes back to the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a project that hopes to make sure all Linux distributions and other Unix-like systems do some things alike so that admins familiar with one can easily work with another, and software developers only need to package one set of binaries instead of making one set for Red Hat, another for SUSE, one for Mandrake, one for Debian, and so on.