Purdue grad talks about Linux
By Tom McHenry
Summer Editor
The man who started the revolutionary Debian project
spoke on Monday in the Physics building.
Ian Murdock, a 1996 Purdue graduate in the school
of Sciences, spoke to more than a hundred Purdue students, faculty, and
interested community members.
Murdock said that he’s been using Linux for
around seven years, quite a long time considering the "alternative"
operating system has only existed for nine.
Linux is a computer operating system developed by
thousands of people all over the world connected only by the Internet
and their love of the project. Linux has raised a cult following among
the computer savvy looking for superior, customizable software that is
constantly being tinkered with.
It was this strange development style that first
attracted Murdock to Linux. "It struck me how absolutely remarkable
that Linux even existed," Murdock said.
Recently Linux and its major distribution companies
like Red Hat and Slackware have come to media attention as an alternative
to the near-monopoly of Microsoft Windows.
This has only created more interest and more users
for the open source code operating system.
But Ian Murdock remembers what it was like back when
he first found Linux.
Murdock started the Debian project when he was still
a student at Purdue because, he said, "I wanted to build a better
distribution."
Distributions are the collections of software that
comprise an entire Linux operating system.
Murdock started Debian by posting a message on a
newsgroup and said that he shortly found many other people that felt the
same way he did.
Debian grew both in numbers and amount of accomplishments.
"Packages", a large file that contained all the parts necessary
to run the larger program, were created. Packages simplify Linux program
installation and setups that could otherwise be very complicated and have
become a sort of "industry standard" for Linux distributors.
"Despite what the Red Hat guys will tell you,
we did the package thing first," Murdock said.
Murdock soon found it difficult to be both a college
student and run such a large project, and left the project in 1996. Debian
continues to grow though. When Murdock left there were around 200 people
involved and now there are more than 550 people managing 4200 packages.
Murdock finished his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona
where he was, "exposed to good ideas and smart people."
It was these same good ideas that he would take with
him when the Linux Capital Group approached him about running his own
company, Progeny.
Progeny is working to develop a new type of computer
networking. Now, when large numbers of computers are networked, individual
computer terminals are really just branches off of centralized file and
process servers.
Though these larger central computers allow each
computer to share from the same pool of resources, if these servers crash,
the results can be disastrous.
In his time at Arizona, Murdock said, it wasn’t
uncommon to find people just wandering the halls with nothing to do because
the central computer had crashed and their work was inaccessible.
These centralized computers seem the best solution
to the problem of simplifying the difficult task of managing and using
a network.
Murdock wants to change that.
Progeny’s idea is to create a network of computers
where "the network is the computer." In other words, each computer
will contain the resources to act as the file and process server itself,
while still being interconnected to every other computer.
Resources will be shared by every computer rather
than contained in a central place, Murdock said.
"This is not a new idea at all, it’s an
idea that’s been around a long time," Murdock said.
What is new is Murdock’s approach. Progeny plans
to offer the ability to interconnect computers that run even on different
operating systems (even the scorned-by-Linux-users Microsoft Windows).
Other ideas include process migration, which will allow active computers
to use the processing power of computers in the network not being used,
and support for mobile computing, allowing laptops to run on the network.
"He explained very complex concepts very simply,
but without talking down to people," Chris Uzelac, a sophomore in
the school of Liberal arts at Indiana University, said.
"From even the little things he said, you could
tell he really knew what he was talking about," Seth Heckard, a sophomore
in Purdue’s School of Technology, said.
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