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The goal of the Linux(TM) Standard Base (LSB) is to develop and promote a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant Linux system. There are currently LSB specifications available for the Intel Architecture IA-32(TM) processors and for the 32and 64-bit PowerPC(TM), Itanium(TM), 31-and 64-bit zSeries(TM), and AMD64(TM) architectures. This paper describes the process of building LSB-compliant applications, and covers the use of the LSB development environments, testing of binaries, and packaging.
Development of the Linux** kernel was started by Linus Torvalds in 1991. By 1992, some early Linux distributions such as MCC (a Linux distribution from the Manchester Computing Centre), TAMU (a distribution from Texas A&M University) and SLS (Softlanding Linux System) were easily available over the Internet. Distrowatch.com, a comprehensive Web site following Linux distributions, has over 350 distributions in its database.
Standards for operating systems can reduce the incompatibilities between various implementations. The POSIX** standard is an example of an API (application programming interface) standard which has helped keep a certain level of commonality among UNIX** implementations. Where there are large numbers of implementations, as is the case with Linux, widespread core compatibility makes it possible to have applications that work correctly on many implementations.
The Linux Standard Base (LSB) is a set of operatingsystem standards with the goal of increasing compatibility among Linux distributions and enabling software applications to run on any Linuxcompliant system. The LSB is developed and promoted by the LSB workgroup of the Free Standards Group (FSG), an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the use of free and open-source software by developing and promoting standards. Other examples of standardization workgroups of the FSG are OpenI18n (which addresses issues of internationalization), OpenPrinting, and the Open Cluster Framework (which defines standard clustering APIs).
The LSB workgroup is divided into several subprojects, each of which is responsible for a major component of the project; such as, its specification, futures, testing, sample implementation, example applications, and the build environment. There are tools available to test distributions as well as the third-party applications that will run on those distributions.
The project was first announced in May of 1998, and the first official version of the LSB specification was released...