A Linux fl'.lvor or distribution (commonly referred to as a distro) is a specific s'et of software. windows management system. and a desktop environment packaged along with the Linux kernel. There are a wide range of distros available. for a wide range of specific and generic purposes.

For example. a non-eommercial, highly-portable distro for a desktop wourd be Puppy Linux. A very comprehensive. non-eommercial desktop distro would be Debian. and a commercial, very secure. enterprise distro would be SUSE. There are many permutations and combinations. as well as fundamentally different philosophies. Some distros are available only in their horne language. for example. the Malayalam distro. Rachana. and the E-Swecha Telegu distro which is in development. There is a small, portable. multimedia centric distro called GeexBox. and . Gentoo. a distribution that compiles the source code based on the hardware it is installed on. making it highly optised for performance.

Distros of Linux have been around almost as long as Linux itself. and many distros have spawned child. grandchild and even great-grandchild distros. One of the big differences affecting end users are how installation files for software are distributed for these distros. and there are two families. rpm-based and deb-based. Debian and its derivatives used the deb installation. which includes Ubuntu. Most other Linux distros use the rpm packaging.

A distro typically has a mechanism for resolving dependencies. which are like' .dll files for Windows. This can range from yum in rpm-based distros like Fedora and SUSE, and apt-get for Debian and Ubuntu. A good choice of a distro can be made after understanding their roots, and where the distros come from. This chart outlines the main distros and how they evolved.

Arch Linux is one of the biggest proponents of the KISS. principle, which stands for Keep it Simple, Stupid. Contrary to common sense, the distribution is actually pretty difficult to learn and has a huge learning curve. The KISS principle refers to the design of the software itself, and not how idiot-friendly it is. Arch Linux is a lightweight distro, and advisable for those users who are comfortable with the command line and want to move on from Ubuntu or SUSE. The great thing about Arch Linux is that it has a dependency resolver, as well as reposito- ries, something that is rare amongst distros that embrace the Kiss principle.

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Commercial Linux Distros often have the disadvantage of competing with distros that rebuild the same code and distribute the operating system for free. CentOS is an example of this phenomenon, which is a slight variation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, the popularity of Red Hat is still far greater because of the support Red Hat offers, tearing down the myth that open source software is not commercially viable. CentOS releases tend to follow close on the heels of a new Red Hat release, and is meant for enterprise computation. The distro is rpm-based and uses yum to resolve dependencies and handle packages.

Debian is a large, comprehensive distro, driven by a dedicated community of volunteer developers. One of the biggest success stories Of Linux, a large number of distros are derived from Debian. Packages are handled in the .deb format, and the default depend¬ency resolver is apt-get. There have been ports of Debian to differ¬ent kernels as well, including BSD and GNU. Debian is usually used with the Gnome Desktop Environment, which is common to many of the distros derived from Debian. Debian has regular releases, with one of the largest software repositories.
Fedora 10 has been released recently, and is one of the most <ommon distros for servers. Fedora has a large repository, uses rpm packages and yum to resolve dependencies. Fedora is the distro of choice for the creator of Linux, Trovalds himself. Fedora comes with a choice ofKDE and Gnome desktop environment. Fedora is a mature and robust distribution to try out.

Gentoo has a novel approach amongst distros, where every software, and the operating system itself is compiled and optimised for the hardware on which it is running. This is achieved by an engine called catalyst. This means that Gentoo is the distro for power users who want to get the most out of their operating system. Although packages take a lot longer to install on Gentoo because of the added compilation time, the very latest builds of software are supported by this distro because of the way it is built. For example, although OpenOffice.org 3.0 was available by the time Ubuntu 8.10 was out, Ubuntu 8.10 was not able to include the latest version of OpenOffice.org along with the distro. Linux Mint 6, which is based on Ubuntu 8.10, also could not offer the latest version of OpenOffice.org. Such restrictions are absurd for Gentoo, and the latest releases of all software can always be compiled on this distro.

Knoppix is one of the first distributions to make Live CDs popular. A Live distro is a Linux distrubution that can boot off the CD Drive, and operate through the RAM, without writing anything to the hard drive. Knoppix is Debian-based, and is still one of the most popular Live CD distros around. The biggest advantage of Live CD distros is their ability to recover data from a hard drive after an operating system crash.

Linux Mint is a distro based on Ubuntu, and has its own repositories, but also supports Ubuntu repositories. It is even simpler to use than Ubuntu. for two reasons. There are a whole bunch of customisation tools available for managing the as, and many codecs are available out of.the box, which makes Linux Mint unique as most distros do not ship with codecs to avoid lawsuits. because the codecs are proprietary. The distro is one of the few good-looking ones out there, and supports XFCE. Gnome and KDE.

Mandriva is a commercially backed as. based on Red Hat. It is optimised for system administrators. and uses urpmi or rpmmandrake to manage dependencies. It is an rpmbased distribution. Mandriva used to be called Mandrake. and is one of the more common distributions around. Mandriva also released a commercial gaming edition.