This week has been full with activities involving Linux, Linux and Linux. And the Dell server for BookJetty is finally up, loaded with LAMP (Linux, Apache, My SQL, and PHP), Tomcat and also the new vBulletin based BookJetty forum. Now it’s just pending the green light from the webhost, Qala.com, to move the server there.

Having lived and breathed Windows, switching to Linux was a bit daunting initially, but having played with it for a week, I started to fall in love; at least my typing speed has improved!!

Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is the obvious choice if you are a start up or you just want to save some money to buy iPod. Linux is free, it is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL), but what the @#$%, why Dell is charging me a couple of hundred bucks for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Well, before answering that, the Linux here means the Linux kernel, the basic libraries that form an operating system. Since it is licensed under GPL, which in layman terms, it means you can use it, modify it, repackage it with other software, do whatever you want, but you have to give your version for free too. So pretty fair, isn’t it?

And the different repackaged versions of Linux kernel are commonly known as Linux distributions, the cool jargon is Linux Distro. So you may have heard of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, SUSE Linux, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and others; those are the different distributions of Linux.

So each distribution is different, though all of them are using the Linux kernel for the core. As for the RHEL history, it is a bit tricky. It was started as Red Hat Linux (without the Enterprise word), but in late 2003, Red Hat Linux was merged with Fedora Linux (another distro), and born out of that is the commercial version (RHEL), and the free version is known as Fedora Core.

But wait, how could they charge the RHEL, isn’t it still under GPL license? Oh hell ya…it is, RHEL source codes are still free, you can still download it from Red Hat Inc. web site. What they are charging you is for the binaries they have compiled in a CD, for support, for software update subscription. Smart move! And it makes sense for the ENTERPRISE, there’s someone to call now if anything goes wrong.

If you are a start-up like me, that is what we call luxury, and that, is a deadly sin. But no worries, there are other free distributions available. Fedora Core is one of them, but it is not as stable as RHEL, as new libraries for RHEL are first relased in Fedora Core, which then moved to RHEL after they are more stable.

But again, worry not, thanks to another open source community, they downloaded RHEL source codes (well, they are free right?), and create a final distro which is very similar to RHEL, called CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System). Halleluja!!

Another disto will be SUSE Linux (I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to pronounce). It’s by Novell, similar with RHEL, it has commercial and free version available. Free version is also known as SUSE Linux OSS (what a name).

Now you know why Linux is still not gaining as much adoption as Windows, though it has been gaining a lot of mementum lately. Just to understand the distros can be stressful enough. But, don’t you feel a little smarter if you know other OS other than Windows?

And the recent popularity of Linux was partly contributed by the latest very -user-friendly distro known as Ubuntu (it means ‘humanity towards others’). It is a spin off from Debian Linux project, which simply a more user friendly version. Ubuntu as two editions, the desktop edition and server edition.

And I have to stop now, or you will never visit my blog again. At the end, I chose Ubuntu for my server. It just took me a couple clicks and minimum inputs to setup a basic running LAMP server. But of course there are other things to work on after that.

So Linux for you? And which distro? :)