Guest post by Linux Foundation has announced Linux Standard Base 4.0 beta. LSB attempts to provide a consistent Linux platform for ISV’s. These are a number of changes. Following Red Hat’s efforts to consolidate on NSS, LSB has endorsed it as the cryptography solution as well as providing new distribution tests and tools for certification of third party applications.
This new version of LSB promises to accomplish these goals in a more powerful way. “We have a new set of LSB tools to make it much easier for ISVs to development applications that are LSB compliant, and to test to see how portable their applications are via the Linux Application Checker,” Ted T’so, Chief Platform Strategist and Fellow with the Linux Foundation, explained.
The choice of NSS is driven by the need for better backward compatibility, FIPS certification and reduced maintenance costs. Additionally, the new standard scripts are more portable and will help catch issues.
How many Linux distributions are actually LSB certified?
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/lsb-cert/productdir.php?by_prod
There is a list. Not that many compared to the number of distros out there. I find it surprising the likes of Fedora, Debian, and Slackware are not to be found on the list, so not certified. Also interesting is that current versions of OpenSuse or Ubuntu have not bothered to be certified, though they were at one point. I really hope this is not another dying idea.
I believe certification costs money, which is why community driven distros like Debian and Fedora do not have it. This doesn’t mean they aren’t LSB compliant, of course.
They really need to fix this situation. Those are three of the most important distros, forming the basis of countless others. They should be certified if the LSB is to be of real value.
I guess more interesting than this rather short list of certified distros would be a list of distros that claim to conform to a particular version of the LSB.
Does such a list exist?
Though Debian strives[1] to follow and comply with the Linux Standard Base, and the ‘lsb’ package is sufficient for most practical purposes, it explicitly[2] doesn’t claim full compliance…
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLsb
[2] http://packages.debian.org/etch/lsb
“I believe certification costs money, which is why community driven distros like Debian and Fedora do not have it. This doesn’t mean they aren’t LSB compliant, of course.”
Certification is at no cost and done by the Linux Foundation.
Interesting. Does any know why Fedora and Debain aren’t certified?
I see Fedora has a “redhat-lsb” which appears to serve a similar purpose to the above-mentioned DebianLsb.