Monday, February 18, 2013

What's the difference between Linux operating systems?

Q. Linux has a lot of operating systems, I'm not even going to bother to list them. I was wondering, it there a difference between them? Does each type of Linux operating system hold a specific purpose? For example, Red Hat holds a different functionality to Ubuntu, or something like that.

A. Linux has many distros but all versions of Linux are the same OS.

Linux is extremely customizable. So much so that it'd be impossible for one person to do all the tweaks necessary to have what most people consider a polished and functional operating system. On top of that many Linux distros are heavily customized for specific purposes. Robotics, hardware appliance (routers for example), Real time OS (traffic lights, microwave ovens, unmanned aircraft), Music studios, Network security, Home theatre, Cash register, various industrial and scientific specialties, generic servers and so on.

There are also distros that are specialized to fit on a 1.44 floppy, thumb drives and a few distros specifically designed to run on CDs rather than be installed on a machine. There are distros that mimic other operating systems such as Mac OS and Windows so closely that at a glance you wouldn't know that you were not using those OS's. Other's are branded such as Dell's version of Ubuntu which is customized for Dell hardware.

There are also commercial versions of Linux. Red Hat Enterprise for example which is designed for high end servers and IBM's SUSE which has customizations for running on IBM virtual servers/being the host OS for the virtual servers, a desktop version which much of Europe's governments uses.

Distros often come with sub distros that are customized for various purposes. For example most major distros have a KDE and a Gnome version These are customized to people's favorite window managers and some distros support up to 5 or 6 window managers with sub-distros. Most support at least 2 or 3. Long term support, special purpose sub-distros like Ubuntu Studio which is geared for musicians are also common with widely used general distros.

The majority of distros however are shortcuts for Linux users to get what they want/need without spending the thousand of hours personally making those customizations. For example some like myself do too much customization and install too much software to upgrade a machine every 2 years. So long term support versions appeal heavily to me. I need and use a large variety of applications so it's important to have very large software repositories. Other people choose high performance bare bone distros. Some people want total control over their sytem and choose primitive distros that give you the bare min necessary, anything else the user installs themselves and customize as they see fit. (not recommended for anybody but an expert).

There are philosophical choices involved in choosing a distro. One big split for example is RH vrs Debian based systems. The RH fork (RHE, SUSE, Mandriva, CentOS) and Debian fork (Ubuntu, Debian) have some small differences in the way they are built. For example RH systems use YUM for software installation while Debian based systems use Apt-Get. You can install and use YUM on Debian systems and Apt-Get on RH systems. It's just a matter of defaults. Same with how root privileges are handled, and other minor details. The average user won't notice such subtle differences.

I've included a link to distro watch which gives details about specific distros as well as release cycles and where to download them.

Where can I download an iso of Red Hat 6 for free?
Q. I do know about Fedora and the RHEL rebrands such as CentOS. Is Red Hat free to use if support is not needed, or do they charge for updates as well as support?

A. It was my understanding that Red Hat is one of the very few Linux Distributions that you are required to pay for.... Try something else, like Ubuntu...
www.ubuntu.com

Thousands of pages of community and company support, easy to use, etc..

How do i delete Linux OS off my computer?
Q. I want to take off Linux red hat OS off my comp. so I can download windows XP and I'm new in the IT world can someone PLEASE take me step by step through this process
When I try and boot from CD (XP OS) it gives me a black screen? I feel like I need to edit in terminal?

A. When you're installing Windows XP, you'll have the option of deleting the Linux partition and installing Windows XP over it.



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