updated Mar 7, 2013 2:35 pm | 18,283 views
Revision as of 14:12, 7 March 2012
LINUX is a kernel to an Open Source operating system. It is being developed and promoted by the Open Source community. The Open Source operating system is often referred as a GNU/Linux operating system but consists of many programs with different licenses not affiliated with GNU. From now on we will refer to GNU/Linux as just LINUX for simplicity.
The main part of the LINUX operating system is the kernel, which actually is the core of the operating system. This code manages the hardware resources of the system and orchestrates its activities. The kernel along with all system utilities constitutes an operating system. Linux is obtained via download from a network or from other physical media such as CD-ROM's, DVD's or floppy disks. There are many different distributions of Linux. These distributions vary in the types of utilities they include, their purpose, and support. Usually the version of the kernel code determines the version of the Linux flavors or distributions.
LINUX has its design roots in UNIX proprietary systems. The LINUX kernel was originally to be an independent replacement of the minix kernel. It was later combined with the GNU system attempt at a free Unix like operating system, a posix compliant system, to be known as GNU/Linux. In 1991 Linus Torvalds , a student from Finland, released one of the first working kernels starting a rapid development towards a leading enterprise operating system: LINUX.
The Penguin is the mascot of the LINUX community. One point of interest is that the beak of the LINUX penguin is yellow instead of the black beak normally found on a penguin. It most resembles an Adelie penguin. The Penguin's name is Tux. The name Tux came from the amalgamation of Torvalds UniX, also referring to the impression that penguins resemble people wearing tuxedos.
There are more than 300 different verions, or "distributions" (or "distros"), of Linux, many of which have small variations from their parent distro.
The two primary divisions are those derived from Red Hat and Debian. Outside these two main branches are Slackware (one of the earliest distributions), Gentoo (in which most packages are built from source code), and Linux from Scratch (in which the entire system is compiled from source code. Ubuntu has become an extremely popular distribution especially for the desktop. It's related to Debian. Gentoo has a ports system (update system) that attempted to bring what the developers considered the good points of FreeBSD ports to the Linux environment.
Once based on a custom combination of Debian packages, MEPIS has evolved from a Live CD (derived from Knoppix technology) into a desktop distribution based on KDE, the easy to use desktop environment popular in easy to use Linux distributions.
The distribution founder, Warren Woodford, wanted to create a distribution that was extremely easy to install, so he began with a Live CD, created an installation program that would allow you to first examine the system live to ensure it functions on your system, then, with a simple click and answers to a few simple questions, optionally install it to disk.
When Warren moved to KDE, he simplified the environment. He collaborated with Robin (Roblimo) Miller, who wrote a book entitled "Point and Click Linux", which contained a CD with a newly produced edition of SimplyMEPIS. From that point on, the distribution has been generally referred to as SimplyMEPIS, rather than MEPIS.
Warren participated in a collaborative effort to share the development of a custom Debian kernel and a collection of packages known to work. This effort was known as the DCC, a Debian Consortium consisting of Ian Murdock's company, Progeny, MEPIS, and a couple of other companies.
Warren found that even with this collaboration, there was too much effort involved in synchronizing with Debian if packages were to be kept even reasonably up to date. Finally Warren left the DCC and began to produce SimplyMEPIS based on the Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. SimplyMEPIS 6.0 and 6.5 are each based on the LTS release, but contain features to further improve device support and ease the user experience.
That experiment did not work out as well as Warren had envisioned either. He had to fix plenty of things, and the LTS became even more static than the quickly aging Debian Stable core. Therefore, for SimplyMEPIS 7.0, and since that time, Warren Woodford has returned to using Debian Stable. For Version 7.0, SimplyMEPIS was based on Debian Etch. For Version 8.0 (and the 8.0.6, 8.0.10, and 8.0.12 incremental updates) SimplyMEPIS was based on Debian Lenny.
For Version 8.5, under development and at the Beta 3 stage as of the end of December 2009, the KDE 4.3.4 desktop from Debian Squeeze and the remaining stable software from Debian Lenny were used to produce an interim release intended for early 2010. There was no SimplyMEPIS 9.0 or 10.0 release because there was no Debian release in either 2009 or 2010. There was, however, a SimplyMEPIS 11.0 release in the Winter of 2011, closely following the Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" release.
Another very interesting development, PCLinuxOS began in a humble way, simply using packages that were rebuilt from Mandrake (now known as Mandriva). Around the same time that MEPIS was first being developed, Bob Reynolds, known as Texstar, was considering building his own distribution. He was very familiar with RPM packages. He liked what had been done with KNOPPIX, but wanted to create something easy to install, pleasing to look at, and immediately usable. He took some of the best ideas from KNOPPIX, MEPIS, Debian, and applied them to the core Mandrake tools. He replaced the urpmi and urpme packaging tools from Mandrake with Debian's apt-get and Conectiva's synaptic (Conectiva is now part of Mandriva). The result is a very easy to use system that incorporates several of the best features from several excellent utilities and applications.
Earlier we mentioned that Debian and Red Hat form the basis for a large number of well-known Linux distributions. Debian, along with Slackware, are two of the longest surviving distributions. Debian is most well known for its packaging method, dpkg, the core tool, and apt-get, the utility that calls dpkg after determining which libraries and related packages are needed to enable the packages you choose to install to work correctly, with the right versions for your system.
Upon this core technology, a great number of distributions, including SimplyMEPIS, KNOPPIX, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, and countless others, have been built, several of which consistently rate among the top twenty distributions recognized by DistroWatch, a Linux distribution tracking and distribution news site.
For many years, when it comes to commercial use of Linux software, Red Hat has been the leader, and for good reasons. Red Hat has consistently chosen to use free software, and tries very hard to use software with freely available source code. They have also purchased a number of companies, who do the same thing, so over the years, Red Hat has developed a strong "software stack" for database, Web development, content management, cloud computing, security enhanced systems, and virtualization (hypervisor) based solutions.
Red Hat wisely got out of the hobbyist distribution production directly a number of years ago and focused only on enterprise computing. To meet the needs of hobbyists and developers, they formed a Fedora Core organization to produce rapidly evolving, leading edge advanced development systems. Fedora Core was later renamed Fedora, and to this day, it represents cutting edge software, a test bed for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux development, but also a great platform for developers.
Red Hat is not the only platform for developers. There are many others. One of the long time descendants of Red Hat, Mandrake, evolved from Red Hat in 1998 by producing one of the first KDE based desktop systems designed to be easy to use. Over the years, Mandrake developed its own tools and its own very distinct identity, and they created a Mandrake Club, as well as the Mandrake Cooker to provide a very early development environment for new application releases.
Mandrake was renamed Mandriva at the time that Mandrake acquired the assets of Conectiva and Lycoris.
In 2010, Mandriva laid off many of its development team, and in September 2010, those team members and others formed a community based system called Mageia, which has released Mageia 2 in late Spring 2011 and plans Mageia 2 to be released during Spring 2012.
You cannot mention the other early distributions without bringing up another early distribution, SuSE. Originally developed around the same time as Slackware and Debian, SuSE was first created, just like Slackware and Debian, because the early distributions lacked stable packaging methods. According to Wikipedia, S.u.S.E., "Software und System-Entwicklung", meaning "Software and systems development", was first developed in 1992, and the name was shorted to SuSE in 1998, and officially sold to Novell in January 2004. Novell later rebranded the products, creating openSUSE (similar in concept to Fedora and Mandriva Cooker) for free distribution, and the enterprise products, SLED (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server), which are among the leading commercial products today.