Ubuntu
Its name comes from the Zulu word "ubuntu", loosely translated as "humanity", describing the ubuntu philosophy: "A person is a person only through other people". Ubuntu's goals include providing an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation.
Ubuntu has been rated as the most popular Linux distribution for the desktop, claiming approximately 30% of desktop Linux installations in a survey.
Ubuntu is free and open source software, meaning that not only is it distributed without charge, it may also be freely improved upon. Ubuntu is sponsored by UK based company Canonical Ltd, which is owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.
Instead of selling Ubuntu itself, Canonical makes money by selling paid technical support for Ubuntu. By keeping Ubuntu free and open, Canonical is able to leverage the talents of outside developers willing to contribute rather than having to do all development within the company itself.
Canonical endorses and provides support for four Linux distributions closely tied to Ubuntu: Kubuntu and Xubuntu, which use KDE and Xfce as a desktop environment, respectively, instead of the default GNOME system; Edubuntu, a subproject designed for school environments and should be equally suitable for children to use at home; and Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "Juice"), a concept system operating in the context of a virtual appliance.
Ubuntu releases new versions every six months and supports those releases for eighteen months, with daily security fixes and patches to critical bugs.
LTS (Long Term Support) releases, which occur every two years, are supported for three years for desktops and five years for servers.The current version of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex, was released on October 30, 2008.
History and development process
Ubuntu was initially forked from the Debian project's code base. The aim was to release a new version of Ubuntu every six months, resulting in a more frequently updated system. Ubuntu's first release was on October 20, 2004.
Ubuntu releases always include the most recent GNOME release, and come out about a month after GNOME. In contrast with previous general-purpose forks of Debian — such as MEPIS, Xandros, Linspire, Progeny and Libranet, many of which relied on proprietary and closed source add-ons as part of their business model — Ubuntu has stayed closer to Debian's philosophy and uses free (libre) software most of the time, other than some proprietary hardware drivers and codecs.
The Ubuntu logo and typography has remained the same since that first release.
The hand-drawn, lowercase OpenType font used is called Ubuntu-Title and was created by Andy Fitzsimon. The font is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and use with logos derived from the Ubuntu logo is encouraged. The font is available as a package for Ubuntu.
Ubuntu packages are based on packages from Debian's unstable branch: both distributions use Debian's deb package format and package management tools, APT and Synaptic, although Debian and Ubuntu packages are not necessarily binary compatible with each other, and may need to be rebuilt from source. Ubuntu cooperates with Debian — to some extent pushing changes back to Debian, although there has been criticism concerning lack of occurrence. Many Ubuntu developers are also maintainers of key packages within Debian. However, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, criticized Ubuntu packages for incompatibilities with Debian, saying Ubuntu had diverged too far from Debian Sarge to remain compatible.
Ubuntu is currently funded by Canonical Ltd.
The purpose of the foundation is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth describes the foundation as an emergency fund in case Canonical's involvement ends.
Before release, packages are imported from Debian Unstable continuously and merged with Ubuntu-specific modifications.
Canonical has released previous LTS versions every two years, and has committed to releasing the next LTS version in 2010, two years after 8.04. Meanwhile, the current standard-support period release, Ubuntu 8.10, was released on October 30, 2008.
Vendor support
A number of vendors offer computers with Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell computers running Ubuntu 8.04 include extra support for ATI Video Graphics, Dell Wireless, Fingerprint Readers, HDMI, Bluetooth and MP3/WMA/WMV.
Features
A screenshot of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, showing the Dawn of Ubuntu wallpaper
Ubuntu focuses on usability, including the widespread use of the sudo tool for administrative tasks. The Ubiquity installer allows installing Ubuntu to the hard disk from within the Live CD environment without the need for restarting the computer prior to installation. Ubuntu also emphasizes accessibility and internationalization, to reach as many people as possible.
Beginning with 5.04, UTF-8 became the default character encoding, which allows for support of a variety of non-Roman scripts. The default appearance of the user interface in the current version is called Human and is characterized by shades of brown and orange.
The most recent version of Ubuntu comes installed with a wide range of software including the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, the internet browser Firefox, the instant messenger Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim), the BitTorrent client Transmission, and the raster graphics editor GIMP.
Several lightweight card, puzzle, and board games are pre-installed, such as Sudoku and chess. Ubuntu has all networking ports closed by default for added security; its firewall offers fine-grained control of incoming and outgoing connections.
GNOME 2.22—the default desktop environment of Ubuntu 8.04—offers support for 46 languages. There are numerous ways to install Ubuntu, outlined below.
Live CD
Installation of Ubuntu is generally performed with the Live CD, which presents the system to the user as it would run off the drive (albiet with a performance hit from loading applications off the disk). This is particularly useful in testing for hardware compatibility and driver support.
The CD also contains the Ubiquity installer, which guides the user through the permanent installation process. CD images of all current and past versions are available for download at the Ubuntu web site.