Ubuntu: Up and Running

The Parts That Make Up Ubuntu

Ubuntu, named after a South African word meaning “humanity toward others,” is a free operating system (OS) with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation. It is sponsored by the UK company Canonical Ltd., owned by Mark Shuttleworth.

By keeping Ubuntu free and open source (I’ll define these terms in a moment), Canonical says it is able to utilize the talents of a community of developers. Canonical makes its profit from selling technical support and from creating other services related to Ubuntu.

In 2005 Shuttleworth also created the Ubuntu Foundation, kicking it off with a 10 million dollar grant, which he calls insurance for the project should he ever cease his involvement. The foundation’s purpose is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu. In December 2009, Shuttleworth stepped down as CEO of Canonical to “focus on product design, partnerships, and customers.”

Ubuntu (whose logo you can see in Figure 1-1) strongly relies on other developers, too, as it’s a fork of the Debian project’s code base, itself a popular Linux distribution.

Figure 1-1. The official Ubuntu logo

Debian

Initially developed in 1993, Debian—a contraction of the first name of the developer, Ian Murdock, along with that of Debra Lynn, a former girlfriend—is not backed by any company, yet it still manages to provide the basis of over a dozen other ...