“Ian Murdock has been involved in the development of Linux for
over 7 years. In 1993, Ian founded the Debian Project, and from
1993 to 1996, Ian was Debian Project Leader, building it from an
idea to one of the world’s largest and most influential Open Source
projects. He is the President and CEO of Progeny Linux
Systems, a developer of Linux-based software for network computing
environments.”
“What is Linux NOW and how does it relate to Progeny
Debian?”
“Ian Murdock: Linux NOW is a system that turns a network of
workstations into a single integrated system. The basic observation
is that many things are much harder on a network of machines than
they are on a single machine. For example, system administration is
much harder on a network of, say, a hundred machines than it is on
a single system. It is also much harder to share resources
effectively, to provide a consistent environment to users, to keep
a good handle on security, and many other things. Furthermore, the
bigger the network gets, the harder the problems get, and solutions
quite often don’t scale.’
“So, what we’re doing is building a system that makes a network
look like a single system, to simplify many of those tasks.
Administration is simpler because there is only one system to
manage rather than many. Resources may be shared much more
effectively because the entire network looks like a single system
with a single set of resources. The user’s environment is
consistent across the network because the network is a single
integrated system rather than just a collection of independent
machines strung together by a physical wire.”
“Linux NOW is related to Debian in that Debian provides its
foundation and core infrastructure. That being said, Linux NOW is
basically a set of programs and modifications to the kernel, so
there’s nothing in the design that would prevent it from running on
other distributions. We decided to use Debian as the base for Linux
NOW because it provides an excellent foundation and core
infrastructure.”