What is main difference between Linux OS's and How many are there?
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at
06:55
(Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE,Fedora, Knippix,… )
Tagged with: fedora
Filed under: Linux
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Second question first: Too many to count. Linux is a UNIX-derived OS which had most of its elements in place when the kernel was written:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=code+linux&hl=en&client=firefox-a&emb=0&aq=f#
Think of it as a do-it-yourself Operating System kit which is relatively straightforward to port to ANYTHING. After the Playstation 3 with its cell processor was released and TerraSoft released their official Linux for it it took about two weeks for the other distributions to port their versions over to Linux. If you are learning about computers, there is even a live cd which will allow you to roll your own:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
Linux Torvalds, who wrote the kernel, once said "distributions are just a way to get it on your computer anyhow." At the time he was running it on an old PowerPC Mac. That’s both one of the strengths and one of the features of Linux, because it uses and is derived from the GNU Tools, it is not tied to any one computer architecture and literally runs on everything from smart phones to supercomputers.
Now the differences are also a tough answer to give. The two oldest, which are technically oriented, (and were preceded by one which nobody talks about any more) are Slackware, which is as close to Linux from Scratch as you can get without actually doing it, and Debian. These and many important differences between them and Red Hat are primarily technical. Debian, which was named after the founder and his now-wife Debbie, used the dpkg update system (and deb packages). Red Hat followed soon after. It is primarily a business-oriented OS though often used and distributed by the government. It and the company behind it were cofounded by an American Developer named Marc Ewing, after whose distinctive red fedoras the company is named and a Canadian Businessman named Bob Young. It used the rpm update system which was extremely powerful and straightforward.
With these Ur-distributions, which they are, things get interesting. Terrasoft, which I mentioned above, was essentially founded to port Red Hat over to the Macintosh back in the days when the Macintosh used PowerPC chips (which are ancestral to Sony’s Cell processor). Suse, a German distribution, Mandrake, a French distribution, and Connectiva, a Brazilian distribution which merged with Mandrake to form Mandriva. There is also something called Caldera Linux which is really defunct– the company which made it bought the rights to the name the SCO group and is suing everyone claiming it owns Linux and all associated properties. RHEL and Fedora are the current versions of Red Hat. RHEL is the stable version, Fedora is more like a beta version of RHEL (though there are beta Fedoras out there). I should name in passing recent derivations of both such as CentOS, Wazobia Linux, White Box Linux and Unbreakable Linux.
Debian is the most prolific creator of new distributions. It has spawned Knoppix, a live cd created by a German Computer Consultant for use as a portable desktop when making house calls, Damn Small Linux, affectionately called DSL which is a whole Operating System which fits onto 50 to 80 MegaBytes of memory, and Ubuntu, which has inspired almost as many versions as DSL (hikarunix is my favorite derivative of the latter: it’s a live cd which is optimized for playing Go on-line). Linux Mint, Fubuntu, gNewSense, and the various religious distros of Ubuntu should go without saying. There are a LOT. But Debian, which I’m writing this on, continues full speed ahead.
Slackware Linux has also inspired new versions. Slax is th most common. Dyne:Bolic is probably one of the most colorful derivatives. Optimized for graphics it was created by an Italian Rastafarian who lives and works in Amsterdam "for media activists". It is a live CD and I recently downloaded and installed Slackware — the parent distro — on one of my laptops using it after I discovered Installpkg and Removepkg the Slackware equivalents to dpkg on it. And my slackware works fine. I hadn’t realized I had gotten so good with it and I’m more comfortable with it than I’ve ever been.
Recently there is a new technical distribution called Gentoo Linux which uses the Portage Package Management system. It recompiles all its software on your computer so it is optimized for your computer. You can get precompiled packages if you use a derivative called Saboyon Linux.
Ubuntu sticks close to Debian for a LOT of good reasons, including that by letting Debian do all the heavy development work they can focus their, actually limited because they are an act of Ubuntu, resources on making it EASY to use. That is the sort of thinking behind almost all the derivatives of other distributions.
And that is why your questions are both essentially unanswerable: the Wikipedia article on the subject says there are more than three hundred of them, but its origin among techies means it is so easy to change and d
Not that hard to count – http://www.distrowatch.com, where a count has already been done. You can even read about some of the differences on that site.