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The day of the Zenguin

I had a talk with Scott McNeil and Bodo Bauer on Saturday morning. Both were once known as part of the core of SuSE's American operations; now they are pushing a new venture called Zenguin. Zenguin hopes to change the environment for those developing and using Linux applications, thus creating a new explosion in the numbers of both users and applications.

Zenguin's product, at first blush, may look a little unimpressive: it's an installation system. Why would Linux need such a thing? After all, it already has the Red Hat and Debian package managers, which generally make installation (and deinstallation) a breeze. Why make another one?

The point is, of course, that this is something different. Even if you have a system which supports rpm or dpkg, not all package files will work for you. How many SuSE users can really install all those Red Hat RPM's out there? If you are a software vendor (or a hardware vendor with associated software), you still face a nightmare of different systems to deal with if you want to support all Linux users. Software vendors do not like that.

How does Zenguin deal with this? Inside the Zenguin installer is a bunch of clever code which looks at what you are trying to install (be it an RPM file, tarball, or whatever). It digs out anything that might be system dependent (file locations, programs to run, whatever) and does the right thing for the system it is actually running on. Thus, for example, that init script that your package wanted to put into /etc/rc.d/init.d gets redirected to /etc/init.d, as your distribution needs. Suddenly you can install packages that were not explicitly built for your distribution.

Along with this you get a nice graphical interface to the installation process. If you are not running in a graphical mode, however, no problem; they have terminal-based modes as well.

This is intended to work so well, and so easily, that your parents can install packages on their Linux box they picked up at Target. They are trying to "Mom-proof" this aspect of Linux system administration.

They see great advantages for free software developers as well. Most, if not all, of the Zenguin installer will be released under an open source license. Free software projects will be able to take the installer, package up their code with it, and instantly have an "install everywhere" binary distribution.

If the installer is available as open source, how does Zenguin make money? Commercial, supported versions will be available to manufacturers; many of them, according to Scott, "don't like free stuff." Additional modules to support things like registration or license management (getting the key from the user and making sure it is legit) will be available. I asked Scott if he had any big-name clients; answer was "none that I can talk about yet."

It looks like a win all the way around. Users of Linux get easier management of their software. Free developers get a free system to manage their installation processes. Commercial software vendors get help in supporting multiple distributions, and get support as well. Users of all distributions get working, installable packages. And the Linux community as a whole gets a strengthening of the distribution diversity that makes Linux strong.

--jc

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