Distros & their package managers, or a brief Linux family history
Package management systems are one of the deepest divides between Linux distros.
One family uses .DEB - Debian and things made from Debian. What makes .DEB good is not the format itself or the basic tools (`dpkg`, `dselect`) that handle it; it's the meta-package-management tool on top, `apt`. Apt has automatic recursive dependency resolution. This means packages much be fetched from carefully-structured repositories, primarily over the Internet.
RPM is much more basic and for years didn't have a meta-manager on top and had no form of dependency resolution. I started to use Red Hat in 1996 or so and stuck with it for 2-3y. Installing something new usually meant going and finding and installing, in the right order, sometimes hundreds of libraries and dependencies. Certainly typically 4-5-6, maybe dozens.
It was a nightmare.
However, this loose coupling made RPM portable.
The first Linux distro ever, pretty much, was the Softlanding Linux System, SLS.
SUSE was originally based on SLS, as was Slackware. SUSE later adopted RPM.
Mandriva started out as Mandrake, which was "Red Hat with KDE" (because KDE was not 100% free at first, because KDE is based on Qt and Qt wasn't Free.) Thus Mandrake inherited RPM from RH.
Thus the 3 main families of RPM-based distro today:
* Red Hat, meaning RHEL and Fedora and spins thereof (BLAG, CentOS, White Box, Scientific Linux, Oracle Unbreakable Linux, etc) - these use YUM from Yellow Dog for dependency resolution. (YD was Red Hat for PowerPC.)
* Mandriva (inc. Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Ulteo) - forked off RH; uses URPMI for dependency resolution
* SUSE (SLES, SLED, OpenSUSE), which uses YAST for dependency resolution.
That's one family tree.
The other significant one is Slackware, which tried not to use package management - it's tarballs all the way down. Remixes include Slitaz, Zipslack and others.
Then there are some recent distros which have invented their own package managers - e.g. Arch and Gentoo. Gentoo builds everything from source and has a tool for managing source trees, `portage`, inspired by FreeBSD's `ports` tool.
Arch is reinventing the wheel. Personally I don't see the point.
Even back in the late 1990s, hardcore techies were saying Debian's system was far and away the best. I tried it then but it was just too hard to install. Some metadistros fixed this to some degree:
- Libranet (commercial, I never tried it)
- Storm Linux, AKA Stormix (Debian with a good graphical installer. I liked it but once installed you were On Your Own.)
Then the first big attempt to make a usable end-user Linux, Corel LinuxOS. I really liked it but it was commercial (with closed-source bits) and fussy about hardware. It died when Corel signed up with Microsoft to use VBA and Office toolbars in Corel Office - there's no proof but after signing the licensing deal, *suddenly* Corel dropped all its Linux projects.
Corel LinuxOS was spun off and became Xandros. Again, very good but commercial and fussy about hardware.
Noted FOSS advocate Bruce Perens said "something must be done" and proposed an easy, end-user-focused, one-CD all-free Debian-based distro. All-free meant GNOME. His project produced a couple of betas and then foundered and died.
Then along came the SABDFL, and paid for to be done properly. That's Ubuntu.
All remixes of Debian.
So, in summary, if it uses DEB it's based on Debian.
RPM was inferior but not so tied to the distro, repositories, etc. and so caught on and was adopted by other distros leading to 3 main families.
And there are some "independents" who've invented their own.
One family uses .DEB - Debian and things made from Debian. What makes .DEB good is not the format itself or the basic tools (`dpkg`, `dselect`) that handle it; it's the meta-package-management tool on top, `apt`. Apt has automatic recursive dependency resolution. This means packages much be fetched from carefully-structured repositories, primarily over the Internet.
RPM is much more basic and for years didn't have a meta-manager on top and had no form of dependency resolution. I started to use Red Hat in 1996 or so and stuck with it for 2-3y. Installing something new usually meant going and finding and installing, in the right order, sometimes hundreds of libraries and dependencies. Certainly typically 4-5-6, maybe dozens.
It was a nightmare.
However, this loose coupling made RPM portable.
The first Linux distro ever, pretty much, was the Softlanding Linux System, SLS.
SUSE was originally based on SLS, as was Slackware. SUSE later adopted RPM.
Mandriva started out as Mandrake, which was "Red Hat with KDE" (because KDE was not 100% free at first, because KDE is based on Qt and Qt wasn't Free.) Thus Mandrake inherited RPM from RH.
Thus the 3 main families of RPM-based distro today:
* Red Hat, meaning RHEL and Fedora and spins thereof (BLAG, CentOS, White Box, Scientific Linux, Oracle Unbreakable Linux, etc) - these use YUM from Yellow Dog for dependency resolution. (YD was Red Hat for PowerPC.)
* Mandriva (inc. Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Ulteo) - forked off RH; uses URPMI for dependency resolution
* SUSE (SLES, SLED, OpenSUSE), which uses YAST for dependency resolution.
That's one family tree.
The other significant one is Slackware, which tried not to use package management - it's tarballs all the way down. Remixes include Slitaz, Zipslack and others.
Then there are some recent distros which have invented their own package managers - e.g. Arch and Gentoo. Gentoo builds everything from source and has a tool for managing source trees, `portage`, inspired by FreeBSD's `ports` tool.
Arch is reinventing the wheel. Personally I don't see the point.
Even back in the late 1990s, hardcore techies were saying Debian's system was far and away the best. I tried it then but it was just too hard to install. Some metadistros fixed this to some degree:
- Libranet (commercial, I never tried it)
- Storm Linux, AKA Stormix (Debian with a good graphical installer. I liked it but once installed you were On Your Own.)
Then the first big attempt to make a usable end-user Linux, Corel LinuxOS. I really liked it but it was commercial (with closed-source bits) and fussy about hardware. It died when Corel signed up with Microsoft to use VBA and Office toolbars in Corel Office - there's no proof but after signing the licensing deal, *suddenly* Corel dropped all its Linux projects.
Corel LinuxOS was spun off and became Xandros. Again, very good but commercial and fussy about hardware.
Noted FOSS advocate Bruce Perens said "something must be done" and proposed an easy, end-user-focused, one-CD all-free Debian-based distro. All-free meant GNOME. His project produced a couple of betas and then foundered and died.
Then along came the SABDFL, and paid for to be done properly. That's Ubuntu.
All remixes of Debian.
So, in summary, if it uses DEB it's based on Debian.
RPM was inferior but not so tied to the distro, repositories, etc. and so caught on and was adopted by other distros leading to 3 main families.
And there are some "independents" who've invented their own.