Linux has hit the mainstream. A quick walk through any local major computer and electronics retail store will show this—the software offerings include boxed versions of various Linux distributions, and the hardware offerings include systems or appliances that use Linux in one form or another! Hardly a day goes by without a mention of Linux (or open source software) in widely read print or digital publications. What was only a hacker’s toy several years ago has grown up tremendously and is well known for its stable and fast server performance. If more proof is needed, just note a common question that is now asked of chief technology officers (CTOs) of Fortune 500 companies: “What is your Linux or open source strategy?”
With the innovative K Desktop Environment (KDE) and GNOME environments, Linux is also making inroads into the Windows desktop market. We will take a look at some of the core server-side technologies as they are implemented in the Linux (open source) world and in the Microsoft Windows Server world (likely the platform you are considering replacing with Linux). But before we delve into any technicalities, we will briefly discuss some important underlying concepts and ideas that affect Linux.
LINUX—THE OPERATING SYSTEM
Usually, people (mis)understand Linux to be an entire software suite of developer tools, editors, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), networking tools, and so forth. More formally and correctly, such software collectively is called a distribution, or distro. So the distro is the entire software suite that makes Linux useful.
So if we consider a distribution everything you need for Linux, what then is Linux exactly? Linux itself is the core of the operating system: the kernel. The kernel is the program acting as chief of operations. It is responsible for starting and stopping other programs (such as editors), handling requests for memory, accessing disks, and managing network connections. The complete list of kernel activities could easily be a chapter in itself, and in fact, several books documenting the kernel’s internal functions have been written.
The kernel is a nontrivial program. It is also what puts the Linux badge on all the numerous Linux distributions. All distributions use essentially the same kernel, and thus, the fundamental behavior of all Linux distributions is the same. You’ve most likely heard of the Linux distributions named Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSuSE, goBuntu, and so on, which have received a great deal of press.
Linux distributions can be broadly categorized into two groups. The first category includes the purely commercial distros, and the second includes the noncommercial distros, or spins. The commercial distros generally offer support for their distribution—at a cost. The commercial distros also tend to have a longer release life cycle. Examples of commercial flavors of Linux-based distros are RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), etc.
The noncommercial distros, on the other hand, are free. The noncommercial distros try to adhere to the original spirit of the open source software. They are mostly community supported and maintained—the community consists of the users and developers. The community support and enthusiasm can sometimes supersede that provided by the commercial offerings.
Several of the so-called noncommercial distros also have the backing and support of their commercial counterparts. The companies that offer the purely commercial flavors have vested interests in making sure that free distros exist. Some of the companies use the free distros as the proofing and testing ground for software that ends up in the commercial spins. Examples of noncommercial flavors of Linux-based distros are Fedora, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, goBuntu, Debian, etc. Linux distros like Debian may be less well known and may not have reached the same scale of popularity as Fedora, OpenSuSE, and others, but they are out there and in active use by their respective (and dedicated) communities.
What’s interesting about the commercial Linux distributions is that most of the tools with which they ship were not written by the companies themselves. Rather, other people have released their programs with licenses, allowing their redistribution with source code. By and large, these tools are also available on other variants of UNIX, and some of them are becoming available under Windows as well. The makers of the distribution simply bundle them into one convenient package that’s easy to install. (Some distribution makers also develop value-added tools that make their distribution easier to administer or compatible with more hardware, but the software that they ship is generally written by others.)
What Is Open Source Software and GNU All About?
In the early 1980s, Richard Stallman began a movement within the software industry. He preached (and still does) that software should be free. Note that by free, he doesn’t mean in terms of price, but rather free in the same sense as freedom. This meant shipping not just a product, but the entire source code as well.
Stallman’s policy was, somewhat ironically, a return to classic computing, when software was freely shared among hobbyists on small computers and given as part of the hardware by mainframe and minicomputer vendors. (It was not until the late 1960s that IBM considered selling application software. Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, they considered software merely a tool for enabling the sale of hardware.)
This return to openness was a wild departure from the early 1980s convention of selling prepackaged software, but Stallman’s concept of open-source software was in line with the initial distributions of UNIX from Bell Labs. Early UNIX systems did contain full source code. Yet by the late 1970s, source code was typically removed from UNIX distributions and could be acquired only by paying large sums of money to AT&T (now SBC). The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) maintained a free version, but its commercial counterpart, BSDi, had to deal with many lawsuits from AT&T until it could be proved that nothing in the BSD kernel was from AT&T.
