Sunapsis.org

So, imagine you’re a programmer at Microsoft and this week you’re taking email from customers with technical issues. One particular piece of email is from someone with a website that was running on a Windows-powered server but it has crashed. The screen now says the site isn’t working and happens to reference Microsoft as the Operating System. The guy sending the email is hot and he’s demanding to know why Microsoft has “invaded” his website and is blocking anyone from accessing it. He’s demanding that you (the programmer) remove “the Microsoft program”. Ponder for a moment, what good would a Windows-based computer be if you uninstalled Windows?

The story is real, except that we’re talking about Linux instead of Windows. The guy sending the email is the city manager and he’s calling the FBI if you don’t remove the program (in this case the operating system) within 12 hours. Obviously he doesn’t understand what he’s asking for.

Not much here yet…

www.microsoft.com
www.windows.com/update
www.technet.com

Linux, in case you’ve never heard, is an open source operating system (OS), and is sometimes a free alternative to running Microsoft Windows on your PC or server. Because of the nature of it’s license, many companies or individuals have the right to compile their own “flavor” and redistribute it, typically with a “brand” name referred to as a distribution.

Two of the more popular enterprise-level distributions are Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Suse Linux from Novell. A distribution called CentOS is Red Hat’s source code compiled and stripped of all branding (CentOS refers to them as a “prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor”). Ubuntu is a relatively new distro that is built on the meaning behind the word (see Ubuntu (ideology) on Wikipedia.org) and is now the most popular distribution on DistroWatch.com.

More Information

• Linux on Wikipedia.org
• Linux.org The Linux Home Page at Linux Online

• Linux.com The Enterprise Linux Resource