Since the time Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel back in nineteen nineties, Linux world developed in to various fragments resulting thousands of flavors to choose from. This created freedom for users who are interested in choosing different software for their purpose and eventually created the community movement called FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Although some of the companies who made free Linux distributions for end-users and servers later converted in to businesses who sell Linux, the remaining distributors kept their philosophy straight and did not start selling “open source” software. Anyways, Debian distribution is one of the most respected flavours of Linux which is popular for its stability. Therefore, Debian was widely used for servers and did not reach the Linux newbies in great scale.

But when Canonical Inc. started looking at offering a world class, feature rich Linux distribution for free based on core open source values, they picked Debian as the primary distribution that they would like to use as the foundation of their distribution. I have no idea how they came up with the word “Ubuntu” for their distribution name but it has a nice meaning which goes beyond software development.

Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution among the new adopters and general users. This is widely due to the feature richness of the distribution and the increased usability. Ubuntu includes thousands of freely available software with an easy-to-use package management system so, even non-techies can use Ubuntu for productivity purposes. Ubuntu offers two versions as the desktop and server versions. Currently Ubuntu owns the top rank in most of the Linux forms and polls. Again, Ubuntu has become the top ranker for the most downloaded distribution in many download sites.

Although Ubuntu official release comes with Gnome desktop environment, there are few versions available with other desktop environments and window managers: Kubuntu – Ubuntu with KDE, Edubuntu – Ubuntu for young human beings, Xubuntu – Ubuntu with Xfce desktop environment and Gobuntu – Ubuntu which strictly provides only free software. The end users can choose any suitable Ubuntu version from the above distributions.

We talk a lot about Linux and open source software but have forgotten GNU initiative which was started decades ago for laying the foundation for free software. This is mainly due to the popularity Linux achieved during the past decade and I assume it was not intentional. Anyways there are few distributions that promote Linux as GNU/Linux and these distributions are mainly focusing on fully GPL (General Public License) compatible software distribution. One good example is Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Let’s look at the inception of GNU and the motives behind the initiative. GNU is an operating system composed fully with free software and it was publicly announced on September 27, 1983. This news was published in two newsgroups – net.unix-wizards and net.usoft by Richard Stallman. The primary motivation behind GNU was to wholly free computer operating system into existence. UNIX was popular but costly so Richard wanted a Unix-like operating system to be developed for the general public. In this exercise, software source code should be supplied with the operating system or the software and anyone who is interested in it should be able to freely modify the source code and distribute their own modified version to the general public without any legal implication. Later, in 1985, GNU published its manifesto including its philosophy of free software and now it’s covered under GPL.

The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU is Not UNIX. The initial plan was to develop GNU to be fully compatible with UNIX but for years, GNU didn’t have a proper kernel in place. What they had was remote procedure call kernel called TRIX developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Then GNU had a plan to adopt BSD 4.4-Lite kernel but this was not successful due to the loose corporation by BSD programmers. Anyway, after several kernel adaptations, GNU/Hurd has become the finalist, which is GNU’s own kernel. After the popularity of Linux kernel, Linux has become the most stable and popular system for hosting GNU software. But do not misunderstand: Linux kernel is not a part of GNU!