What to consider when picking a Linux distribution

One of the first distributions I knew about was Slackware . This distribution was available on floppy disks, although you had to install it on a hard disk to use it. The earliest version, as documented in Unofficial History of Slackware came out in July of 1993 with kernel 0.99pl11A. To put this in perspective, the first announcement for Linux was in August 1991.

The next distribution to make a mark on the history of Linux was Redhat. From my own experience I can tell you that Redhat grew from a bookshop in Connecticut call ACC (I think that was the name) In my collection of CD's I have a Red CD with one of the original versions of Redhat Linux, from July of 1994.

Another early distribution which started in Germany was Suse. Before it was purchased by Novell, Suse was the major Linux version in Europe. I has built up a solid base in Europe though support and Innovation. Suse created the configuration tool Yast . This tool has been a boon to many users who did not know how to configure the system otherwise. It is still considered one of the best admin tools, although it has it's own problems.

Debian grew from the same inspiration that produced the FSF (Free Software Federation). In some ways this makes sense because remember that the tools used in Linux came mostly from the FSF team originally. In fact it was Linus's ability to make use of these tools which allowed Linux to grow beyond it's Minix roots.

Gentoo has a much shorter history than the others. It has gained support for 2 reasons. First it uses a somewhat unique install process. The downside is you probably can not really install Gentoo on any machine which does not have a good internet connect. Secondly, the Gentoo community has build some very good documentation on how to configure their system.

Gentoo is a distribution aimed squarely at the Advanced users. It's install method is basically to boot strap the machine, and then rebuild the applications on that machine. The upside is that the applications are tuned to work on the given hardware. But, it requires you to make decisions about which libraries to include and what compiler options are best for your hardware.

Users Groups are one form of information sharing used by Linux. Yes there are user groups for other operating systems, but from my experience, the ones for Linux are the most vocal and helpful. You see since Linux is a free operating system, people who join the users groups are typically interested in sharing their experiences and knowledge.

As an example I went to Google and did three searches for user's groups. I searched for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Macintosh user groups. The results are interesting, Especially when I break it down by .org, .net, and .com.

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The real interesting part of this table, is that Windows claims 90% of the market when it comes to user. So why isn't it 10 time the size of Linux and Macintosh combined? Another source of information are the Linux Mail lists. These lists tend to lead to FAQs which cover many common questions. Does that mean that more conversation takes place for Linux. Look that way.

Tutorial Web Sites: is often a sign of support from the community. So it is interesting to look at the number of tutorial web sites. Now, in an attempt to eliminate commercial web sites, I only counted the number of tutorials hosted on .org web sites. Here are the results:

Numbers do not tell the whole story though. If you look at the sites themselves you will find sites like The Linux Documentation Project and "The Linux Installation and Getting Started Guide", "The Linux User's Guide", "The Linux Programmer's Guide", and "The Linux Network Administrators' Guide"

Manuals and/or Online help is another form of help for some distributions. Sometimes these sites are connected to, or written by, the distributions themselves, some times these are simply web sites which have collected information about a specific site. And sometimes they are an effort by the community around the distribution to help other users.

The classic example, for me at least were the manuals which were distributed with Redhat Linux. Many of these manuals are sill available on the web. Despite them being old, they are often well written.

It is not hard to figure out who would be creating manuals. Primary they are done by the commercial distributions since they can afford the people who write the manuals.

But it is not always the commercial distributions which create good documentation based on their distribution. Interestingly there is a web site Gentoo Wiki which is run by the users, and contributes a considerable amount of quite detailed information on how to use the distribution.

Books: aimed at specific distributions are another common form of help for distributions.

If you go to a book store, of check out an on line bookstore you can find books written about specific distributions. Some of these are good references works about specific distributions. Some of the books even come with the distribution included on a CD.

For someone just getting into Linux these books are often the best choice. They are organized in a way that gives you a fairly complete introduction to the distribution and it's idiosyncrasies.

One source I found was Linux Central seems to have a good selections of books on Linux Distributions.

If we look at most operating systems, they tend to evolve in versions. This is good in some respects because it allows you, as the system designer, to rethink how you put the system together. It could give you a change to reorganize the location of some files, to eliminate some old package, by opting for newer and better applications.

This is the typical model used by Windows: from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Window 98 to Windows 2000 to Windows XP and beyond. The good part of this is it allows you the user to get a new model, much like a new car. But the down side is that once you decide to upgrade, you need to throw out your old installation and start over. Yes I know some distributions can do what is known as an upgrade over the top of the old version. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that the upgrade often is not as thorough as a new install leaving you with inconsistent results.

As a practical matter, I try to do a new install each time I wanted to move to a new version. Another problem is that after a while the packages in the old version are no longer supported. This means that you are on your own once the community decides to move their support to a new version.

But, some distributions are now going to a continuous update model. The two I am familiar with are Debian, and Gentoo. Debian allows you to keep upgrading your distribution piece meal as new versions of the application become available. Now you might ask, why is this different than the version upgrade, I disliked above? My experience has been that the Debian model works because the changes are smaller from version to version with more limited changes. Instead of going from KDE 2.0 to KDE 3.0 you would upgrade through the incremental small changes considered stable along the way. The point being that something like KDE does not change all at once, it moves in stages from one version to another. Could there be disruptions, sure, but it is more likely to be one or two apps which stop working, not all of KDE. To be honest, I have not spent enough time with Debian to say how well this works, but it looks good so far. The key to this incremental upgrade process comes from their package management system, which we will discuss below.

Package management has come a long way since I started with Linux. The advantages of a good package management system are not obvious when you install the system, but make a big difference later when you add or remove applications.

Lets start off by discussing what package management is all about. Typically each application which is install on an operating system, consists of many files. Some of these are executable files, some are libraries, some are documentation, and some are configuration files. Lets take an example to illustrate what I am talking about.

Lets suppose you wanted to install the application gawk on your computer. When it was installed on this computer it included the following files: (I have added comments, after the # signs to the list below detailing what the files are.)

This is a list of all the files included in the gawk package for this computer.

Now the package manager not only keeps track of what file she installed, where they are and what version they are. This information about the application is important for two reasons. First if you want to upgrade the application, you need to know which files belong to it. Second, if you are installing an application which uses gawk, it will need to know the version of gawk installed to know if it can work with it.

Lets take a few minutes to review some of the package managers I know about. I will explain each and then give you what I see as their strengths and weaknesses.

There are other package managers out there such as Up2date. Even though I have not covered them all, I think you get a reasonable idea of what package management is all about. Understanding how your distribution deals with installing, updating and removing packages will give you one more yard stick when selecting a Linux distribution.

Anyone who wants to read an interesting article about package managers should refer to "The Great Package Management Experiment" from Linux Weekly News.