Novell ZENworks 7 Linux Management: Administrator’s Handbook

Chapter 1. The Evolution of Linux Management

In August 2003, Novell acquired a company called Ximian. Ximian was founded with the goal of building enterprise-class Linux solutions. One of these solutions was called Red Carpet, which was initially built to help Ximian Desktop customers keep their Linux systems up to date. Because a Linux system is basically a collection of packages (RPMs), the Ximian engineers built Red Carpet to deal with the multiple RPM dependencies. Red Carpet consisted of two components. The first component was the Red Carpet Daemon, an open source daemon which could be used to get software updates for one system at a time. The second component was called Red Carpet Enterprise, which was a proprietary, inside-the-firewall ...