ITWire

Despite being primarily a Windows and Mac shop, the company supported a HP server running Xenix out at a coal loader. I was concerned when I saw the command chmod 777 being used as a fix-all for any access problem that came up. I soon took charge of this box, churning out C for Linux one day and Delphi code the next.

I eventually left this company to go back to the University; they gave me a hollowed-out and silver-painted Mac as a farewell gift. A few years later I dropped in to say hi and join them for lunch and I was shown the Red Hat Linux server which now single-handedly performed web serving (via Apache), web proxying (via Squid), file and print serving (via Samba) and POP and SMTP e-mail.

At home, I continued using Red Hat Linux through its successive versions. After a while Red Hat renamed their consumer offering as Fedora, retaining the Red Hat name for their enterprise edition.
I’d always taken the view point that, while I was a Fedora person, Linux distributions were pretty much one and the same. After all, Linux at heart is the kernel, Torvalds’ creation. Then there’s a set of GNU and other free open source software that provides rich functionality. A graphical user interface – these days GNOME or KDE – gives a bit of polish, while an installer and package management tool help with adding and removing software. Although the latter two items may vary, fundamentally any Linux distro consists of pretty much the same things.

Or, so I thought. I heard rumblings about Ubuntu from all different areas. It gained momentum while I was looking the other way. Indeed, even as recently as last year I wrote stories for this column using Red Hat Linux commands and output to illustrate. I was surprised by the amount of feedback which criticised the choice to use Red Hat when Ubuntu was the bees knees.

Sure enough, Ubuntu didn’t seem to have a single bad review when I checked it out. It had gained a reputation for being dead easy to install and a doddle to maintain. Apparently, even one’s grandmother could use it, we were told. I theorised in this column I should apply a “Ubuntu test” to every command or output I used. Yet, then the criticism came the other way; hard-core Debian groupies felt slighted anyone would use such a rogue platform which, they felt, stole from the work of Debian.

It’s hard to deny that the new releases of Ubuntu – most recently Gutsy Gibbon and now Hardy Heron – catch attention more than new versions of Slackware (now up to v12) or Red Hat or Damn Small Linux or a great deal of others. Major PC retailer Dell chose Ubuntu for their line of Linux-based desktop computers which brought great excitement that Ubuntu would be the distribution which took Linux into the mainstream. However then ASUS hit a winner with their wildly-successful Eee subnotebook but this had a custom Linux derived from Xandros.

On the one hand, Ubuntu had all the signs of being the most unifying and popular Linux distro of all time, but on the other I kept finding people grumbling about it. On reflection, the grumbles may be because Ubuntu has been so massively hyped that the reality can be disappointing when compared to expectations. Perhaps Ubuntu has made itself a victim by virtue of its own marketing.

Anyhow, enough about me; time to hear what readers and user group members think.

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