About Linux Meta-distros May 10, 2007
Posted by samwyse in Reviews.2 comments
In the beginning, to use Linux you had to download and compile a kernel, and then download and compile any programs that you wanted to use. This was a tedious and error-prone process, so after a while someone came up with the idea of the “distribution”, aka “distro”. This combined a pre-compiled kernel, a selection of other software, and a process for installing everything onto disk. Since the process of building a distro was still tedious and error-prone, many of the largest are supported by commercial ventures, such as Fedora Project (Red Hat), openSUSE (Novell), Ubuntu (Canonical, Ltd) and Mandriva Linux (Mandriva).
