Why we love Ubuntu Linux (or maybe we don't)

David M Williams
Sunday, 11 May 2008 21:27

Opinion and Analysis

With Ubuntu 8.04 now on the streets, it’s time to catch a breather and reflect on just why Ubuntu gets all the hype. Why is Ubuntu the hottest brand in Linuxdom at this time? Why is it the distro most frequently advocated? I posed these questions to readers and LUG members; here’s the feedback from real-life Linux users.

First some very brief notes on my own Linux journey. Actually, my first involvement with UNIX was on a Gould Electronics superminicomputer at University. We used the GNU C compiler – gcc – for software development.

In my first real job I worked at an aluminium smelter with a Digital Electronics Corporation (DEC) platform. This included the much loved VAX (I was just a bit too young for the PDP era); although we were running the VMS operating system I had a fondness for UNIX from University and was soon given charge of a collection of Ultrix machines that nobody else knew what to do with.

By now, Linus Torvalds had made his mark on the world and Linux was gaining popularity. I downloaded the first release of Patrick Volkerding’s Slackware Linux distribution, downloading 3.5” floppy disk images via Telix over dial-up modem. It ran comfortably on a ‘386 PC with 4Mb of RAM.

The following year I returned to my alma mater, this time as UNIX Systems Manager, with a fleet of servers and workstations from Sun Microsystems. These initially ran SunOS 4.1.3 but I migrated my babies to Solaris when Sun transformed their OS from a BSD base to a System V base. I made one of the first web sites at the University, for the mathematics dept, as the World Wide Web came into existence. Initially, I used CERN’s http daemon but later switched to wn. The apps in place were largely from the GNU stable, like gcc and g++, or were other common open source programs like elm for e-mail and tin for Usenet.

Privately, I was excited by the possibility of running UNIX on desktop computers such as I’d have at home. I sought to find how Linux had progressed and adopted Red Hat Linux which had by then become the subject of books and was available on CD. Red Hat seemed so advanced at the time, particularly with its excellent rpm packaging system. I spruiked its brilliance to others and got my brother onto Red Hat.

After a couple of years I left the University to go join a company that consulted to coal mines. They supplied a car which was a huge draw card. The server room housed a Windows NT domain controller and file server, and then a collection of Macintoshes. One was the mail server, another the backup system, a third ran the critical time billing system. There may have been more. I commented that all these machines could be replaced with a single UNIX computer and they laughed at me.

CONTINUED