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.

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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!

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The number one complaint that came up against open source software and Linux until recent times was their poor usability. Users had to be geeks in order to make much use of any thing in Linux and other UNIX like software. But with some recent innovative initiatives, some Linux distributes have become successful in making Linux popular among the general “non-geek” public. By introducing Ubuntu, Canonical Inc. has been the success story for last couple of years.

When Linux was first introduced to the public, like most other Linux software, disc burning software operated using the shell prompt or command prompt. This was a major setback that made the software unpopular and useless. However, there was a segment of users who preferred command line tools. Their specialty was that they were either highly technical users or application developers.

GnomeBaker is one of the first few disc burning software’s introduced for Linux. Although it initially operated with limited functionality, more recent versions offered a number of features, which was a definite competition to any commercial disc burning software. Up until recently, these software supported CD burning only. However, the recent releases have been designed to support DVDs and nowadays, GnomeBaker’s simplified user interface provides high usability even for a novice Linux user.

I will disturb this flow of disc burning software list just to make an important note. When you burn any type of disc such as data, audio, disc image etc., you may need to make them Windows compatible at the time of burning. Not all the Linux disc burning software supports this feature. As an example, few days ago I wrote a data DVD using GnomeBaker and it was not readable under Windows as file names were shorten. It was my mistake not to go in to application preferences and select the disc to be readable under Windows.

K3B is one of the most popular disc burning software for Linux. It is available for KDE desktop environment but it can also be used in other desktop environments such as Gnome, Xfce and window managers such as Fluxbox, Enlightenment etc. and I can firmly state that it is the most advanced and easy to use disc burning software Linux ever had.

The list of all disc burning software for Linux is too long for me to mention here. So just do a Google search and see how many open source disc burning software you find. The interesting thing is that some of them are available for Windows free of charge. So, you can simply switch to the new software without paying money for software vendors!

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