ACM Teach Me
CSC243
  1. What is Object Oriented Programming?
  2. What is a class
  3. Let the Coding Begin
  4. Java Variables
  5. Stream Input/Output
  6. Arithmetic Operations
  7. Control Statements
  8. Switch Statement
  9. The For Loop
  10. The while loop
  11. The do...while Loop
  12. Break and continue
  13. Java Strings
  14. Java Arrays
  15. Traversing Arrays
  16. More on Object Oriented Programming
LINUX101
  1. Intro to Linux
  2. Linux Distributions
  3. The Linux Interface
WEB101
  1. What's HMTL?

Linux Distributions

Distributions...there are lots of them


What is a distribution

Linux is a very rich operating system, that we are going to discover. Since Linux is Open Source, one can take the source and create something new (a distribution). Thus, I can take Linux's source code, create a new distribution (also called distro), let's say mounirx. And then, you could take my distribution source code, and from mounirx you could create something called examplex etc...Got the point? This resulted in having hundreds of distributions (actually currently 400).


Distros vs. Versions

Let us consider Microsoft Windows to understand this more. Microsoft has created versions of it's operating system. If we want to show this in a single line this would be:

Windows 3---Windows 95---Windows 98---Windows ME---Windows NT---Windows 2000---Windows XP---Windows Vista---Windows 7

Well, can we translate this to linux? So does linux have versions like windows? No! Linux does not have versions, Linux has distros. And each distro has versions. Want to really see this? So at first let's represent each distro as a line like we did with windows.


Linux distribution timeline website

Each colored line is a distro, and a line represents the versions according to chronological order (see that on top of image). In order to understand what I am talking about you need to click on the image and then zoom in (then get amazed). Finally, are we saying that there are 400 different operating systems with different looks and different services? Well, since each distro is based on another one we could say that this is almost correct as some distros offers same services but with other looks(we will discuss looks later on in another tutorial).