Ubuntu: Up and Running

Chapter 1. About Ubuntu

Some people say South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth is a very lucky man. Others say he’s an astute businessman and talented software engineer. But whichever way you look at it, there’s no denying that he has twice helped steer the course of technological development throughout the world.

In 1995, he founded Thawte, the first company outside the United States to produce a fully encrypted, commercially available web server, and a leading provider of server certification, that he sold for a cool half billion dollars just four years later.

Using the proceeds, not only did Shuttleworth achieve his ambition of blasting into space on a Russian Soyuz and spending over a week in the International Space Station, he also funded the development of Ubuntu, now the largest Linux distribution by a long way.

Since its release in 2004, Ubuntu has consistently topped the chart of the most popular Linux distributions, and it currently accounts for over a third of all installations. In 2009, according to Dimensional Research/KACE, Ubuntu was the second most likely operating system companies intended to deploy in place of Windows Vista or 7. And if it continues its phenomenal growth, 2010 should see Ubuntu knock OS X out of first place in that poll.

So this book is about Mark Shuttleworth’s second major technology hit because, with an estimated 10 million users and growing, a hit it surely is. But to understand what Ubuntu is you need to know a little of its development ...