Linux Software Map

The LSM (Linux Software Map) was an early database cataloguing software developed for Linux (and other systems, such as *BSD). The term LSM refers to both the file format itself, and the information with which one could use it for.

The LSM was a good way to collate a central understanding of the key software available at the time which could be coordinated between different distributions. This was at a time when search engines were of their infancy and software hub sites did not yet really exist. Most software being developed at the time was uploaded to FTP servers, or other self-hosted sites.

ibiblio holds the current format of the LSM itself, and at one point in time allowed for it to be queried. Alas, it appears (as of 2022) that this is no longer the case.

This version found here is not queried server-side -- instead, the data is loaded client-side and processed via the browser's DOM. It is itself not a large dataset, and small enough to be done in this way, but originally, this would not have been the case.

The data itself was extracted from the most recent copy of the LSM available (http://lsm.qqx.org/lsm/LSM) and a quick script written to parse it into something which can be queried via a JSON interpreter.

-- Thomas Adam (November, 2022)

References

• LSM Home Page: http://lsm.qqx.org/lsm/

I hope this page is self-explanatory. The buttons below can be used to toggle the visibility of those columns, and there is a global search feature to find specific entries if desired.