Fedora

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system created back in 2003 as a community distribution called the Fedora Project. It was released along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was to be the next official Linux distribution after Red Hat Linux was discontinued. Its main purpose was to serve as a source of software innovations for the Hat Enterprise Linux releases. This connection between the two Linux distributions explains the origin of the Fedora name – 'fedora' refers to the characteristic fedora hat used in Red Hat's "Shadowman" logo. 

Fedora releases

The first set of Fedora releases, known as Fedora Core 1-4, was launched within the period 2003-2005, followed by the Fedora Core 5-6 set in 2006 and Fedora 7 in 2007. Those versions, however, are no longer supported by the Fedora Project. The following Fedora versions – Fedora 8 (introduced in 2007), Fedora 9 (released in the spring of 2008) and Fedora 10 (launched at the end of 2008), are all officially supported by the Fedora project. The latest of them – Fedora 10, code named 'Cambridge', features a whole new set of innovative characteristics such as a new 'Solar' artwork, faster startup with Plymouth, web-based packages installer, ext4 filesystem support, Sugar Desktop Environment and many others.

Fedora and open source software

The Fedora project is famous for being backed up by an ever-increasing community of both advanced and technically inexperienced supporters from around the world who keep creating innovative free open-source software for Fedora users. Moreover, all new features released by the Fedora community can be easily incorporated into any other Linux distribution. This high productivity makes Fedora a 'factory' for free open-source software innovations where everyone could make a contribution as a volunteer worker.

It is a well-established practice of the Fedora developers to distribute all software fixes and innovations by making upstream changes. This makes it possible for any updates to be instantly available to all Linux distributions that already use Fedora features. Examples of very successful open-source software releases under the Fedora Project include: NetworkManager, PolicyKit, FreeIPA. SELinux, HAL, D-bus, PulseAudio.

The flexible capabilities of Fedora also make it easy for everyone to create their own Linux-based distribution. This can be done by means of Fedora's set of spinning tools, allowing individuals to quickly select the desired packages and create live images for CD/DVD or USB, or installation discs. This has helped many of the official Fedora versions such as Fedora Electronic Lab and Fedora Xfce Spin evolve. 
 

Fedora and security

Just as all Linux distributions, Fedora is focused on security. Unlike Ubuntu, which is another very popular Linux distribution based on Debian, in Fedora a firewall is present right from the start and can be easily configured both using the terminal or via the graphical interface. Fedora also is one of the main promoters for SELinux, which stands for Security-Enhanced Linux, a feature which implements several security policies, which are missing in most of the Linux-based distributions. Additionally, Fedora comes with several custom security enhancements, which derive from its connection with Red Hat's Enterprise Linux. This makes Fedora a very popular choice for web servers. Fedora is also the OS of choice for Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, and is used as the operating system for several NASA systems and supercomputers, such as the Roadrunner.

OpenSUSE

 

OpenUSE was founded on September 2, 1992 in Germany, under the name Gesellschaft für Software- und Systementwicklung mbH (S.u.S.E. GmbH), meaning: "Software and System Development, Inc.". The first GNU/Linux distribution (S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0) was released in 1994 - making SUSE one of the oldest existing GNU/Linux distributions. Originally it was merely a German version of an American distribution called Slackware, but later SUSE has become one of the leading distributions. In 2003 SUSE was acquired by Novell and today development is distributed all over the world, but mainly located in Nuremberg, Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and in the U.S.

In 2005 the openSUSE project was started with the goal of opening up development and involve the community more. openSUSE provides the base for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop and Open Enterprise Server. In 2010 Novell was acquired by Attachmate. The deal was finalized in April 2011, and one of the first actions of Attachmate was to split SUSE into a separate business unit independant of Novell, and move SUSE headquarters back to Nuremberg, Germany.

They may not have realized it at the time, but these young men changed the face of Linux forever. When their first planned distribution lacked a good installation and configuration tool, YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) was developed. Popular for its easy use, attractive graphical interface and the capability to customize your systems quickly during and after the installation, YaST took the Linux enterprise community by storm. And this was just the beginning.

SUSE's technical expertise and customer focus always stood out from other Linux distributions. IBM took notice and increasingly cooperated with SUSE in development work for their high-end platforms. Built on top of the open source Linux kernel and distributed with system and application software from other open source projects, SUSE was one of the first to deliver the value of open source to the enterprise.

In 2004 Novell bought SUSE and expanded community contributions further by sponsoring the openSUSE project and openSUSE Build Service. They made major contributions to the Linux kernel as well as Xen, KVM, OpenOffice.org, GNOME and KDE. Currently operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues to innovate and serve the business needs of its partners and customers worldwide with the best Linux distribution on the market.

Version history

The openSUSE project aims to release a new version every eight months. Since version 11.2, critical updates have been provided for two releases plus two months, which results in a support lifetime of 18 months. To add predictability and to prevent people from thinking the .0 releases are more major, the openSUSE version scheme has changed starting in openSUSE 12.1. All November releases have a .1, all July releases have a .2, and all March releases have a .3. Every two years, when another .1 version is released, the major

10.x Series

The initial stable release from the openSUSE Project was SUSE Linux 10.0, released on October 6, 2005. This was released as a freely downloadable ISO image and as a boxed retail package, with certain bundled software only included in the retail package.

On May 11, 2006, the openSUSE Project released SUSE Linux 10.1, with the mailing list announcement identifying Xgl, NetworkManager, AppArmor and Xen as prominent features.

For their third release, the openSUSE Project renamed their distribution, releasing openSUSE 10.2 on December 7, 2006. Several areas that developers focused their efforts on were reworking the menus used to launch programs in KDE and GNOME, moving to ext3 as the default file system, providing support for internal readers of Secure Digital cards commonly used in digital cameras, improving power management framework (more computers can enter suspended states instead of shutting down and starting up) and the package management system. This release also featured version 2.0 of Mozilla Firefox.

The fourth release, openSUSE 10.3, was made available as a stable version on October 4, 2007^. An overhaul of the software package management system (including support for 1-Click-Install), legal MP3 support from Fluendo and improved boot-time are some of the areas focused on for this release.

11.x Series

openSUSE 11.0 was released on June 19, 2008. It includes the latest version of GNOME and two versions of KDE (the older, stable 3.5.9 and the newer 4.0.4). It comes in three freely downloadable versions: a complete installation DVD (including GNOME, KDE3, and KDE4), and two Live CDs (GNOME, and KDE4 respectively). A KDE3 Live CD was not produced due to limited resources. Package management and installation were made significantly faster with ZYpp.

openSUSE 11.1 was released on December 18, 2008. Updated software includes GNOME 2.24.1, KDE 4.1.3 + KDE 3.5.10, OpenOffice.org 3.0, VirtualBox 2.0.6, Compiz 0.7.8, Zypper 1.0.1, continued improvement in the software update stack, X.Org 7.4, Xserver 1.5.2 and Linux kernel 2.6.27.7.

openSUSE 11.2 was released on November 12, 2009. It includes KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice.org 3.1, improved social network support, updated filesystems such as Ext4 as the new default and support for Btrfs, installer support for whole-disk encryption, significant improvements to YaST and zypper, and all ISO images are hybrid and now support both USB and CD-ROM boot.

openSUSE 11.3 was released on July 15, 2010. It includes KDE 4.4.4, GNOME 2.30.1, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, SpiderOak support, support for the Btrfs filesytem and support for LXDE. It also updates the Linux kernel to version 2.6.34.

openSUSE 11.4 was finished on March 3, 2011 and released on March 10, 2011. It includes KDE 4.6.0, GNOME 2.32.1, Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta 12, and switched from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice 3.3.1. It updates the Linux kernel to version 2.6.37.

12.x Series

openSUSE 12.1 was released on November 16, 2011. This includes KDE 4.7 and GNOME 3.2 and Firefox 7.0.1. The Linux kernel was updated to 3.1.0 It also introduced an advanced disk snapshot tool, called Snapper, for managing Btrfs snapshots. openSUSE 12.1 was also the first release of openSUSE to use systemd by rather than the traditional System V init. Users can still select to boot to System V init at startup time.

openSUSE 12.2 was to be released on July 11, 2012, but was postponed due to persistent stability issues. The final release candidate was eventually announced on August 2, 2012 and the final release date was September 6, 2012. 12.2 includes the desktop environments KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, and XFCE 4.10 and now uses Plymouth and GRUB 2 by default.

openSUSE 12.3 was released on schedule on March 13, 2013. This includes KDE 4.10, GNOME 3.6, Firefox 19.0, LibreOffice 3.6, and the removal of SuSEconfig. Also, the Live CD images were replaced with Live USB images and an XFCE rescue image.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu Linux is one of a number of different flavors of the Linux operating system. The various different brands of Linux are generally known as Linux Distributions (usually shortened to Linux Distros by Linux experts). In terms of the history of Linux, Ubuntu is something of a newcomer. In the relatively short period of time that it has been available, however, Ubuntu has rapidly gained the respect of both experienced and novice Linux users throughout the world.

In this chapter we will briefly cover the history of Linux and the Ubuntu variant of Linux. 

Ubuntu has touched the lives of many among us in different ways. I can't speak for everyone here and hence I will share a few of my experiences with Ubuntu. For me, Ubuntu was the gateway to Linux and the whole open source way of thinking. Ubuntu taught me that computers are not all about Windows OS and that there are far better alternatives than the "default" Windows desktop which you have been made to see and learn from a younger age. Lets go back in time and see how Ubuntu evolved over the years to become what it is now - a totally awesome, user friendly and fast changing Linux based distro for human beings.

A Brief History of Ubuntu

A new version of Ubuntu is released every 6 months and as of Oct 2010, a total of 15 stable releases of Ubuntu has happened. Each release also has a specific code name which are made using an adjective and an animal with the same first letter (e.g. Hardy Heron, Maverick Meerkat). We will have a brief overview of each one of them below. Read on.

Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

Ubuntu 4.10 codenamed "Warty Warthog" marked the beginning of a new kid in the block, the first and foremost release of Ubuntu by Canonical foundation. This new Linux distro was based on Debian and aimed at giving new users a trouble free experience of Linux. This release also crucially brought the Ubuntu shipit feature where by users could get Ubuntu installation CD's mailed to their homes for free through a simple signup. Shipit was one of those important features that augmented the widespread adoption of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)

Ubuntu 5.04 codenamed "Hoary Hedgehog" was released on 8 April 2005. From this second release onwards, massive changes started to trickle in. Ubuntu 5.04 added many new features including an update manager, upgrade notifier, readahead and grepmap, suspend, hibernate and standby support, dynamic frequency scaling for processors among many other major improvements. Ubuntu 5.04 even introduced support for installation from USB devices. 

Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Ubuntu 5.10 codenamed "Breezy Badger" was released on 12 October 2005, the third stable release of Ubuntu by Canonical. Ubuntu 5.10 added several new features including a graphical bootloader (Usplash), an Add/Remove Applications tool, a menu editor, an easy language selector, crucial logical volume management support, full Hewlett-Packard printer support, OEM installer support among others. More importantly, this release also brought in Launchpad integration for bug reporting and software development.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS codenamed "Dapper Drake" was released on 1 June 2006. It was also the first Long Term Support(LTS) release. This was also the only time when the Ubuntu release cycle was slightly pushed forward by 2 months owing to all sorts of delays. Many new features were introduced including having the Live CD and Install CD merged onto one disc, a graphical installer on Live CD, a network manager for easy switching of multiple wired and wireless connections, implementation of Humanlooks theme among other improvements.

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

Ubuntu 6.10 codenamed "Edgy Eft" was released on 26 October 2006, Canonical's fifth Ubuntu release. Tomboy and F-Spot became the new default applications for Ubuntu. Human theme also went through heavy modifications.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Ubuntu 7.04 codenamed "Feisty Fawn" was released on 19 April 2007. This release has a very special significance as far as I am concerned. Well, this was my first ever Ubuntu. I was a complete noob to the whole Linux way of life then and barely installed Ubuntu in my laptop with the help of friends and Ubuntu Forums. And the primary reason for trying out Ubuntu was Compiz to be frank. In those clogged XP-Vista days, Compiz was(and it still is) a breath of fresh air. Meanwhile, check out these stunning Compiz Experimental Plugins for a change.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

Ubuntu 7.10 codenamed "Gutsy Gibbon" released on 18 October 2007. Ubuntu 7.10 introduced Compiz Fusion as a default feature. This seventh release of Ubuntu also marked the introduction of full NTFS support.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

Ubuntu 8.04 codenamed "Hardy Heron" was released on 24 April 2008. This was the second LTS version of Ubuntu. In my opinion, this release had one of the best designed Ubuntu wallpaper as default. Brasero disc burner and transmission bit torrent client were introduced during this release. Controversial Pulse Audio became the new default system sound server. This release also introduced Wubi installer using which you can install Ubuntu inside Windows without repartitioning the disk.

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Ubuntu 8.10 codenamed Intrepid Ibex was released on 30 October 2008. It was the ninth Ubuntu release and it was also one of my favorite releases. This release introduced useful Ubuntu Live USB creator application. Guest session functionality was also introduced during Intrepid Ibex release.

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" was released on 23 April 2009. This release marked the first time that all of Ubuntu's core development moved to the Bazaar distributed revision control system which is designed to make it easier for anyone to contribute to free and open source software projects. Faster boot time was another major achievement of this release.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Ubuntu 9.10 codenamed "Karmic Koala" released on 29 October 2009. From this release onwards, Ubuntu slowly started to shift gears. A slew of changes started to flood Ubuntu. During Ubuntu Karmic's release cycle, Canonical introduced the One Hundred Paper Cuts project, focusing developers to fix minor usability issues. This was a major move and it helped bring a lot of polish for Ubuntu in the latter releases. This release also introduced Ubuntu Software Center which went on to become the application that received enormous amount of attention later on.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)

Ubuntu 10.04 codenamed "Lucid Lynx" was released on 29 April 2010. Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is my favorite release to date and it brought about the biggest amount of changes ever. Ubuntu had a complete branding makeover during this release cycle. Even the brown theme was ditched for the first time for a more bright and pleasant looking "Light" inspired theme. Browse through the amount of changes Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx went through.

Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

Ubuntu 10.10 codenamed "Maverick Meerkat" was released on 10 October 2010 (10.10.10) at around 10:10 UTC. Close to the heels of Ubuntu Lucid release, Ubuntu Maverick was also packed with new features and improvements. Ubuntu Software Center became one of the applications that received maximum amount of attention. Canonical's attention to detail started showing up big time during Ubuntu 10.10 release cycle.

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" was perhaps *the* most controversial Ubuntu release ever. Canonical introduced Unity shell with Ubuntu 11.04 which created quite a furore among its vast user base. Unity was Ubuntu's answer to GNOME 3.0's GNOME Shell desktop, though Ubuntu 11.04 was still based on previous GNOME 2.x.
Reactions from users was not really what Canonical would have hoped for. Unity was far less customisable when compared to good old GNOME 2.x based desktops and that was simply unacceptable to many long-term Ubuntu users.

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

Ubuntu 11.10 codenamed "Oneiric Ocelot" was the first GNOME 3.0 based Ubuntu release. Oneiric did not brought in sweeping changes like its predecessor did. But it does brought in a lot of polish to the controversial Unity UI. LightDM replaced GDM as Ubuntu's new default login screen. Classic Gnome Desktop was completely ditched in favor of Unity 2D during this release cycle. If you are interested, here is a quick screenshot tour of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

At the time of writing this article, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS codenamed "Precise Pangolin" is only a few weeks away from its final release. Precise has a lot to offer for those Unity users who are expecting improvements in the overall stability of the OS.
Quicklists have been introduced as a default feature for the very first time. Apart from the usual three Unity lenses (Applications, Files and Music), there is an additional Video lense too which lets you select and play videos from a variety of sources ranging from your local collection to YouTube Movies, BBC iPlayer and TED Talks to name a few. HUD is default now (don't worry, menus are still there). Default launcher behavior is set to "always visible" instead of "dodge windows". Rhythmbox is back again replacing Banshee as the default music player.
Do read our comprehensive report on what's new in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Special thanks to Wikipedia for screenshots of earlier versions of Ubuntu. Thank you for reading.

RedHat

RedHat, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.

Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called "Red Hat Commercial Linux It was the first Linux distribution to use the RPM Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.

Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for enterprise environments. Fedora, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat, is the free version best suited for home use. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on 2004-04-30, although updates were published for it through 2006 by the Fedora Legacy project until that shut down in early 2007.

Feature

Version 3.0.3 was one of the first Linux distributions to support Executable and Linkable Format instead of the older a.out format.

Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.

In version 6 Red Hat moved to glibc 2.1, egcs-1.2, and to the 2.2 kernel. It also introduced Kudzu, a software library for automatic discovery and configuration of hardware.

Version 7 was released in preparation for the 2.4 kernel, although the first release still used the stable 2.2 kernel. Glibc was updated to version 2.1.92, which was a beta of the upcoming version 2.2 and Red Hat used a patched version of GCC from CVS that they called "2.96". The decision to ship an unstable GCC version was due to GCC 2.95's bad performance on non-i386 platforms, especially DEC Alpha. Newer GCCs had also improved support for the C++ standard, which caused much of the existing code not to compile.

In particular, the use of a non-released version of GCC caused some criticism, e.g. from Linus Torvalds and The GCC Steering Committee; Red Hat was forced to defend their decision. GCC 2.96 failed to compile the Linux kernel, and some other software used in Red Hat, due to stricter checks. It also had an incompatible C++ ABI with other compilers. The distribution included a previous version of GCC for compiling the kernel, called "kgcc".

As of Red Hat Linux 8.0, UTF-8 was enabled as the default character encoding for the system. This had little effect on English-speaking users, but enabled much easier internationalisation and seamless support for multiple languages, including ideographic, bi-directional and complex script languages along with European languages. However, this did cause some negative reactions among existing Western European users, whose legacy ISO-8859-based setups were broken by the change.

Version 8.0 was also the second to include the Bluecurve desktop theme. It used a common theme for GNOME-2 and KDE 3.0.2 desktops, as well as OpenOffice-1.0. KDE members did not appreciate the change, claiming that it was not in the best interests of KDE.

Version 9 supported the Native POSIX Thread Library, which was ported to the 2.4 series kernels by Red Hat.

Red Hat Linux lacked many features due to possible copyright and patent problems. For example, MP3 support was disabled in both Rhythmbox and XMMS; instead, Red Hat recommended using Ogg Vorbis, which has no patents. MP3 support, however, could be installed afterwards, although royalties are required everywhere MP3 is patented. Support for Microsoft's NTFS file system was also missing, but could be freely installed as well.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64. All of Red Hat's official support and training and the Red Hat Certification Program center around the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is often abbreviated to RHEL, although this is not an official designation.

The first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to bear the name originally came onto the market as "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server". In 2003 Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS", and added two more variants, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.

While Red Hat uses strict trademark rules to restrict free re-distribution of their officially supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat freely provides the source code for the distribution's software even for software where this is not mandatory. As a result, several distributors have created re-branded and/or community-supported re-builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that can legally be made available, without official support from Red Hat. CentOS and Oracle Linux aim to provide 100% binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Variants

There are also "Academic" editions of the Desktop and Server variants. They are offered to schools and students, are less expensive, and are provided with Red Hat technical support as an optional extra. Web support based on number of customer contacts can be purchased separately.

It is often assumed the branding ES, AS, and WS stand for "Entry-level Server", "Advanced Server" and "Work Station", respectively. The reason for this is that the ES product is indeed the company's base enterprise server product, while AS is the more advanced product. However, nowhere on its site or in its literature does Red Hat say what AS, ES and WS stand for.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 there are new editions that substitute former Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES/WS/Desktop:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform (former AS)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (former ES) (limited to 2 CPU-s)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Workstation and Multi-OS option
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Workstation option (former WS)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop with Multi-OS option
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (former Desktop)

Red Hat had also announced its Red Hat Global Desktop Linux edition "for emerging markets".

RHEL 4, 3, and prior releases had four variants:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for mission-critical/enterprise computer systems.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES for supported network servers
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for technical power user enterprise desktops for high-performance computing
• Red Hat Desktop for multiple deployments of single-user desktops for enterprises.

“Both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are open source. Fedora is a free distribution and community project and upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a general purpose system that gives Red Hat and the rest of its contributor community the chance to innovate rapidly with new technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial enterprise operating system and has its own set of test phases including alpha and beta releases which are separate and distinct from Fedora development.”