The rising challengers

Posted on 19 Sep 2007 at 16:44

Windows faces a fight on pCs. David Fearon fires up Ubuntu, while Nik Rawlinson tackles Leopard.

Ubuntu: the upsides

You can't fail to have noticed the rise of Ubuntu, a new pretender in the crowded world of Linux distributions. The recent boost to its profile has largely been down to Dell choosing it for its limited range of systems supplied with Linux pre-installed. Even before that, though, Ubuntu had seen a meteoric rise in popularity, overtaking more established distributions such as Fedora Core after only three years in development.

Ubuntu has taken a different tack from other popular distributions. Rather than shovelling in as many open-source application packages as possible and trying to be super-flexible during the setup process, Ubuntu is deliberately streamlined. Where the standard download for Fedora Core 7 is 2.7GB (which you must burn onto a DVD), the ISO file for the latest version of Ubuntu Desktop weighs in at a slim and CD-friendly 698MB.

The installation process is as minimal as possible, too; there's little prompting and no sign of the traditional multiscreen checklists of which applications you want installed - it's all decided for you. The upshot is a lean but functional OS featuring the acknowledged open-source leaders in the key application areas that most people need: OpenOffice for word-processing and spreadsheets; GIMP for photo processing; Firefox 2 for web browsing.

Ubuntu keeps its users interested with new versions every six months, complete with entertaining names. The current version, 7.04 Feisty Fawn, was preceded by the likes of Edgy Eft and Dapper Drake; the next release, scheduled for October, will be 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. As a potential challenger to Windows' dominance, the most intriguing aspect of 7.10 is that, as well as the standard desktop and server versions, it will for the first time include a slimmed-down version of the OS for mobile and embedded devices. Linux is already well established as an OS in low-powered handheld devices - Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet, for example - but as yet there's no standard mobile distribution. With a recognised, brand-name mobile version, there's at least a fighting chance it could start to compete with Windows Mobile.

There's also a server version of Ubuntu 7.04, with one currently unique feature that makes it amazingly attractive for web-server duties. The server distribution gives the option to install itself as a LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) server. The combination of those four applications is what drives around 70% of the world's websites, and ordinarily they need to be individually installed and configured. But after an Ubuntu LAMP install, they're up and running by default, and basically all you need to do is drop your website files into the /var/www directory with, in certain cases, no extra setup required at all. With a following wind, you can literally go from a naked "bare metal" server to one that's secure, fully configured and serving your website in about 20 minutes.

Back on the desktop, most of the traditional objections to everyday Linux use are solved in Ubuntu. Setting up a printer is as easy as it is in Windows; networking (at least the wired variety) simply works with no setup required; configuring file and folder sharing with Windows PCs needs little more than a couple of clicks.

Ubuntu: the downsides

It still isn't an OS for completely unsupported beginners, though, unless the beginner in question wants to use only the pre-installed applications: installing new apps remains a stumbling block. The bundled Synaptic Package Manager - which links to online repositories of thousands of open-source applications - does hugely streamline the installation of new programs, but its interface is austere to say the least.