Peter MacDonald | |
|---|---|
| Born | Peter Charles MacDonald (1957-06-28)June 28, 1957 (age 68) Victoria, British Columbia |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Alma mater | University of Victoria (BSc 1989, MSc 1996) |
Peter MacDonald is aCanadiansoftware engineer, best known as the creator ofSoftlanding Linux System (SLS), widely regarded as the first completeLinux distribution.[1] Some of his work served as a foundation ofWine. He also created theTcl web browser BrowseX, and the PDQI suite of Tcl utilities.
Current projects include Jsish, an embeddable JavaScript interpreter with builtin type-checking.[2]
Peter Charles MacDonald was born inVictoria, British Columbia on June 28, 1957. He graduated from theComputer Science program of theUniversity of Victoria with aBSc (1989) andMSc (1996,master's thesis:Decomposing the Linux Kernel into Dynamically Loadable Modules).[3]
MacDonald co-developed early features of theLinux kernel in the early 1990s, includingshared libraries,pseudo terminals, theselect call andvirtual consoles.[4][5][6] He announcedSoftlanding Linux System (SLS), the first standalone Linux install, for testing in August 1992 (on 15floppy disks),[7] and for general release in October 1992 (recommending at least 10MB ofdisk space).[8]
SLS became popular, but also drew criticism. MacDonald was criticized for trying to make money on free software, but defended byLinus Torvalds.[6] Two of the earlyLinux distributions were made specifically in reaction to SLS,Ian Murdock'sDebian to compensate for SLS's bugs, andPatrick Volkerding'sSlackware to include installer patches which weren't added to SLS, and which MacDonald wouldn't allow Volkerding to distribute independently.[9][10][11]
The initial 1993Wine Windows compatibility layer was based onTcl/Tk windowing functions MacDonald wrote (though later rewritten as directXlib calls).[12]
MacDonald founded BrowseX Systems in 1999,[13] and put out version 1.0 of BrowseX, anopen source Tcl-based cross-platform web browser, meant to be smaller and faster thanNetscape.[14][15] The last update of BrowseX was in 2003; the company was renamed to PDQ Interfaces Inc., and put out a set of various TCL based utilities.[13][16]
Jsish: a javascript interpreter with builtin sqlite, json, websocket, and zvfs support.[17]
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