Tech This Out

Last fall, as Microsoft released Windows 7 and Apple came out with OS X Snow Leopard, a third, lesser-known operating system quietly celebrated its own release. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux-based operating system, made its latest version, 9.10, available to download – for free.

In 1991, a little-known Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds began writing his own operating system, which has become the Linux kernel (The kernel is the core of an operating system, surrounded by the graphical user interface or GUI). Over the nearly 20 years since, programmers all over the world have created their own versions, or distributions, of Linux, because Torvalds’ original code has always been “open-source,” meaning that anyone can download and edit it to their own needs. Ubuntu is just one of many Linux distributions, and its newest version, nicknamed Karmic Koala, is just the latest in an endless string of successes branching from one innovative college student and his philosophy: software should always be free, and anyone should be able to change it at any time.

While software giants Microsoft and Apple pay hand-picked teams of programmers to perfect their operating systems, and then sell those operating systems for up to $320 per computer, Linux operating systems employ communities of coders from multiple nations. Thanks to the Internet, those programmers can each be assigned a separate part of the operating system to work on, and come deadline day, their contributions are combined to create distributions like Ubuntu (which gets its name from an African word meaning “humanity to others”). The results are surprisingly good.

Linux operating systems, like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and Mandriva among others, offer easy-to-use interfaces with countless graphical tools for managing windows, and are efficient enough to run well on computers that had been unusable with Windows. This column is being typed on a five-plus-year-old laptop, with Ubuntu installed on it to replace Windows XP. At times it is more responsive than my two-year-old desktop computer running Windows Vista.

And besides the operating systems themselves, open-source programmers have produced a plethora of outstanding applications. The widely-used Firefox web browser is created by Mozilla, which on its Web site describes itself as “a global community” and “a public benefit organization dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet.” Similarly, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite is a free, fully-functional alternative to Microsoft Office. But these are just two of thousands of open-source software projects, many of which can be downloaded and installed on any Linux distribution. Another important project is Wine, a compatibility layer that allows Linux users to run programs designed for Windows, just as Windows 7 users can run programs designed for Windows XP. Linux is also used as the base for Google’s Android operating system, featured on new smartphones like the Droid.

Linux does have its setbacks, however. It is very difficult to troubleshoot, and in most cases if something doesn’t work right away it will take a computer scientist to figure out why. Even Wine is very much a work in progress, so getting commonly-used programs like iTunes to work on Linux is nearly impossible, although there are certainly open-source alternatives to Apple’s media organizer. Overall, though, Linus Torvalds’ creation is definitely an option for any everyday computer user.