Regular readers will know that Ubuntu Linux is often the focus of this column. The distribution has come to dominate mainstream Linux use outside corporate server rooms.

Indeed, a check on Google will show more results for searches on Ubuntu than any other Linux distribution. Ubuntu is, in fact, one of the youngest distributions; the first version (Warty Warthog) was released in October 2004.

The reason it has managed to gain such a foothold in just a few years is because, from the outset, it aimed at providing a stable, polished desktop environment, with a carefully chosen selection of installed applications.

Before Ubuntu, an installation of Linux would usually involve having to select the applications you wanted, and you might well have ended up with several different ones for the same kind of task, such as four or five text editors.

While Ubuntu is almost certainly the most popular desktop distribution, there are, of course, others that are also popular. Distributions can loosely be divided into two categories: commercial and non-commercial. The former includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux Enterprise, Mandriva Linux and Xandros Linux. The latter includes Ubuntu Linux, Debian, Fedora, Opensuse and others.

A few years ago, it seemed as if a new distribution was being released every week. Thankfully, while there are still a huge number of minor distributions, the list of the major ones is a lot smaller, and Linux development has benefited from this.

A short history of hats
Long before Ubuntu was around, Red Hat Linux was almost synonymous with Linux itself. It was one of the first distributions to exist, back when an installation meant writing raw floppy disk images in MS-Dos to create bootable disks.

In 2003 Red Hat was growing substantially in the corporate server market and the company decided to end support for the venerable and popular consumer-orientated Red Hat Linux. In its place came Fedora Core, which was intended to be a community-driven project.

The Core repository gave a basic functional desktop, while the Fedora Extras repository provided many unofficial (but essential) extras. Fedora was largely controlled by Red Hat, and many users and developers felt it was just a public beta testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise releases. This, together with the confusion over Core and Extras, led to little enthusiasm for the project and may have contributed to Ubuntu’s success.

In May 2007, Fedora 7 was released. Core was dropped from the name, as the two repositories were merged. Support also moved to the Fedora Project, which has meant more active development from the open-source community.