iVirtua Community guide to free operating systems

Linux for Cynics

XP IS GETTING a bit long in the tooth, Vista is a pig andyou don't want to buy a Mac and join the Jobs Cult. So, you're thinking ofhaving a look at Linux, but are bamboozled by the hundreds of flavours and don'twant to spend a weekend discussing it with disturbingly intense bearded men insocks and sandals. So here is the Inquirer's guide to Linux: quick, clear,opinionated and unfair.
There are scores and scores of minor players but only about half a dozen bigones that are worth looking at. We'll ignore all the single-floppy efforts,mini-CDs, routers and firewalls, security toolkits and so on, because they'respecialist and there are too many to enumerate.
Which leaves the big, general-purpose distros, the one-size-fits-all,do-anything offerings. But first, ask yourself some questions. Are you willingto pay? If so, a bit or a lot?
Another significant difference is the desktop. Basically, there are two, bothfairly Windows-like. GNOME is simple (some say too simple), clean and in placesvery slightly Mac-like. KDE is fiddlier, perhaps even cluttered, resemblesWindows a bit more but offers more opportunity to tweak and customise. Yourchoice.
Also, it's worth saying: if you tried Linux a few years ago, it's time totake another look. In the Free software world, things move a great deal fasterthan in the big commercial software houses: releasing a new version every twoyears is seen as slow, stately and considered and several distros put out afresh edition twice a year. Linux knowledge from last year is old-fashioned andfrom a few years ago is positively ancient.
So, in strictly alphabetical order...
Debian
Debian is the daddy.It's one of the oldest surviving distros, partly because its designers thoughthard about the software packaging problem way back when, sorted it and moved on.It has few frills, but it does offer a vast selection of applications, focusedon capital-"F" Free code. The snag - well, it's not exactly renowned for itsuser friendliness. If you need the advice of this article, you don't want tomess with Debian.
Fedora
You hear a disproportionate amount aboutFedora, because it'sAmerican. Development is sponsored by Red Hat, the US Linux giant. Red Hat usedto give away its eponymous product for free. Since 2003, though, it's gone forthe enterprise market bigtime. The free OS disappeared, replaced byRed Hat Enterprise Linuxwhich costs big bucks. It's well-liked by the sort of suits who think thatunless you paid more for the software than you give each month to the poor sodswho maintain it, it can't be worth anything. RHEL is what you want if you tookout a maintenance contract on the office loo. It's safe, reliable and staid.
If you want to try it for free, though, there'sCentOS,compiled from the source code to RHEL, which Red Hat makes publicly available.
To fill the gap left by the end of the official free version, Red Hat createdFedora. It's a sort of free rolling technology testbed for stuff Red Hatmight stick into the grown-up version later. With two releases a year,we'd call it an ongoing beta except that it's had some distinctly alpha-ishmoments. It has lots of enthusiastic and helpful users, so you can get helpfairly easily. For years, the official software installation tool, the Red HatPackage Manager, RPM, was very poor, lacking facilities that rivals had had fora decade, but it's catching up now with more advanced from ends like Fedora'sYUM.
One problem shared by many free Linux distros offered in the USA and certainother jurisdictions is that they can't legally give away for free proprietarytools like MP3, Flash and Java - so out of the box, you can't open these kindsof files. A sign of the corporate mindset behind Fedora is its solution to thisproblem: it tells you where to go to buy licensed commercial versions. Veryhelpful.
Gentoo
Gentoo is the distro forthose who disdain Debian and Slackware for being too easy. The idea is that youcompile it all yourself from source, so ending up with something perfectlytailored to your hardware. Think Vauxhall Nova with plastic body kit, LEDs inthe screen jets, an exhaust you could stick your fist up and a boot full of bassspeaker.
Linspire, Freespire
Linspire is a shinycolourful desktop distro aimed at the pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap market. It'sdesigned to be basic, really easy to install and to closely resemble Windows.Indeed, it used to be called "Lindows" and offered a built-in - and somewhatropey - facility to run Windows programs, until Microsoft sent the boys round.It used to be based on Debian, but more recently has moved to Ubuntu - more onthat later. It doesn't come with much software included - it was cheap and thecompany hoped you'd buy extra apps from their online "warehouse", where theysold an assortment of software that's mostly free anyway. There's a free versionnow, too, calledFreespire,and much of the contents of the online store is free these days too. Bothflavours are pretty good on the proprietary codecs and drivers front, but it's arelatively minor player.
Mandriva
Mandriva used to becalled Mandrake until its makers bought Brazil's Connectiva. Not much of theLatin Americans' technology survived but a couple of syllables of the name did,so that's all right. Mandrake started out as "Red Hat with KDE", when Red Hatwas still free and the dominant distro, and KDE was the trendy new desktop GUI,which Red Hat didn't offer because bits of it weren't entirely Free. Nowadays,though, Red Hat does offer KDE, since which time, Mandriva has set outto distinguish itself as the friendliest Linux. It doesn't always make it butit's a good effort. The main product is commercial and updated annually, butthere are free single-CD GNOME and KDE editions. The success of the company'sefforts at simplification and polish can be judged from the fact that there's afree spinoff of it calledPCLinuxOS, designed tomake it more polished and easy.
Slackware
Slackware is anothersurvivor from the early days, like Debian - and similarly is best left for thebeardies. Compared to the others, it's dead basic - its startup files andsoftware packages stick to ancient Unix methods, avoiding the trendy bells andwhistles of younger Linuxes, although it's gradually gaining some modernfeatures like automatic updates.
SUSE
Novell has got into Linux in a big way, by acquisition - notably, GNOMEprogrammers Ximian and German distro producers Software- unt System-Entwicklung, or SuSE. Now,SUSE is Novell'sbrand of Linux. Formerly a heavily-KDE-based distro (KDE was also a Germanproject at the start), SUSE was best-known for its inexpensive commercialproduct SUSE Linux Professional, a big boxed set with umpteen CDs and DVDscontaining everything you could ever want and pretty decent dead-tree manuals.Novell's changed all that and now follows a more Red Hat like strategy.
Broadly, there are four lines. Open Enterprise Server is "reassuringly expensive" and bundles Netware services on top of a Linux server,which is also available rather more cheaply on its own as SUSE LinuxEnterprise Server (SLES). There's also a client, SUSE LinuxEnterprise Desktop (SLED). Basically these are the core, mosttried-and-tested bits of the distro, bundled with support, updates and so on.New releases come every two or three years, to suit sluggish corporatetimescales.
For cheapskate home users, there's openSUSE. (Thereare free evaluation versions of the enterprise products, but sinceNovell doesn't offer free updates, in effect they're sort of time-bombeddemos.) You can download either a GNOME or KDE edition as a single CD image, ora DVD image with both, or buy it as a boxed set with media, manuals and a fewmonths' support. If you opt for the CD, there are lots of additional componentsonline. OpenSUSE is rather sleeker than the old boxed set and it comes with somecodecs preloaded. Like Mandriva, it's based on RPM and new releases come roughlyannually.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the brown one,possibly because it's got a tan from hogging all the limelight. The name isAfrican, untranslatable from the isiXhosa but roughly m eaning "be nice topeople for a change". It was set up by a young South African called MarkShuttleworth who became absurdly rich by setting up a dot-com and selling it toVerisgn at exactly the right time. After a US$20,000,000 trip to theInternational Space Station, Ubuntu is what he did next, more or less his way ofgiving something back.
Shuttleworth's original plan for Ubuntu was straightforward and similar tothat of the abortive UserLinux project: to pick one best-of-breed program fromeach main category of application - desktop, web browser, office suite and so on- and bundle them up with Debian into a single CD, so there were no confusingchoices or options when installing. The team picked GNOME as an easy, all-Freedesktop.
KDE has a massive following of its own, though, and a version of Ubuntu basedaround KDE and KDE applications instead of GNOME quickly followed. It's calledKubuntu and has been officially adopted as a sister product, as have severalother spinoffs from the many as-yet unofficial derivatives. The GNOME version isstill the official main product, though, with a distinctive look based onshades of brown and orange, African imagery and sound effects.
Ubuntu is still a little raw in places - both SUSE and Mandriva have bettersetup and admin tools, for instance - but with two releases every year, it'smaturing very fast. It's a smooth, polished desktop OS, with decent driversupport. Due to its Debian roots and good design, software installation easierthan on any rival operating system, Macs and Windows included. The project hostsa collection of many thousands of applications on its web servers and you caninstall any of them by ticking one box and clicking OK. This includes a singlepackage called "ubuntu-restricted-extras" which adds support for MP3 and otherproprietary formats with just two mouse clicks.
Sponsored by its multimillionaire founder, there are no commercial orpaid-for versions of Ubuntu: all flavours are completely free. The company willeven ship you professionally-made CDs for no charge if you don't fancydownloading and burning your own. The plan is that ultimately the companybecomes self-financing by selling support and consultancy services to corporatecustomers.
Xandros
Xandros is the OS you willmeet if you buy one of the Asus EEE super-cheap mini-laptops. A distant relativeof Linspire, it's another Debian derivative, originally developed and sold byCorel as Corel LinuxOS, arguably the first really simple, pared-down desktopLinux for non-experts. It's still commercial, although a slightly dated andslightly limited free demo CD is available for download. There are severaleditions, aimed mainly at corporate and business desktops, with a new Servervariant that comes with an MS Exchange-compatible groupware server. Its mainclaim to fame is that it goes out of its way to be Windows-like andWindows-compatible. Its desktop is a modified version of KDE with a WindowsExplorer-like file manager and it can both join Windows domains and run someWindows applications. A slow, corporate-friendly release cycle means that it'snot state of the art, but it's a good choice if interoperating with Windows isyour top priority.
Rounding up
Frankly, despite the embarrassment of riches, we reckon the choice is prettyclear. Avoid the geek distros. Fedora is too experimental. Linspire doesn'treally have much going for it. Xandros does, but it costs and it's not flashy orpretty. Mandriva and openSUSE are good solid offerings, but Ubuntu has thembeat. It costs nothing and you don't lose out on any bonus extras reserved forpaying customers. The free online support and help are excellent, too.
Ubuntu first appeared in just 2004, but already it's claimed more than halfthe "market" according to theOpenSource Development Labs' 2007 Survey. It has more than twice as many usersas Debian and about three times as many as Fedora or SUSE.
Ubuntu Server is still very basic - big businesses wanting a server shouldevaluate Red Hat and SUSE and small ones Xandros or the freeSME Server.
As for the future - for now, Ubuntu looks unstoppable. Give it a go.
First time around, don't use a laptop - use a desktop machine with a wirednetwork connection. Don't dual boot it if you can avoid it - use a PC you canwipe clean. Don't try something state of the art, as there may not be freedrivers yet. Most hardware vendors are too selfish to provide free documentationfor open source developers, so everything must be reverse-engineered. You don'tneed much - just the same sort of spec as for XP. Half a gig of RAM, althoughmore won't hurt, a 2GHz CPU and 20G of hard disk will be plenty. It's faster andeasier to install than Windows, and once it's on, all your applications will beright there ready to use, and it only ever needs a single online update ratherthan half a dozen visits towindowsupdate.microsoft.com,rebooting each time.
Look at it this way. It's free. If you love it or hate it, either way, you'reguaranteed to get your money back!