About Ubuntu......

Ubuntu philosophy

The term “Ubuntu” is a traditional African concept that originated from the
Bantu languages of southern Africa. It can be described as a way of connect-
ing with others—living in a global community where your actions affect all of
humanity. Ubuntu is more than just an operating system: it is a community
of people that come together voluntarily to collaborate on an international
software project that aims to deliver the best possible user experience.
The Ubuntu promise
‣ Ubuntu will always be free of charge, along with its regular enterprise
releases and security updates.
‣ Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from Canonical and hundreds
of companies from across the world.
‣ Ubuntu provides the best translations and accessibility features that the
free software community has to offer.
‣ Ubuntu core applications are all free and open source. We want you to use
free and open source software, improve it, and pass it on.

A brief history of Ubuntu

Ubuntu was conceived in 2004 by Mark Shuthleworth, a successful South
African entrepreneur, and his company Canonical. Shuthleworth recognized
the power of Linux and Open Source, but was also aware of weaknesses that
prevented mainstream use.
Shuthleworth set out with clear intentions to address these weaknesses
and create a system that was easy to use, completely free , and could compete with
other mainstream operating systems. With the Debian system as a base,
Shuthleworth began to build Ubuntu. Using his own funds at first, installation
CDs were pressed and shipped worldwide at no cost to the end user. Ubuntu
spread quickly, the size of the community rapidly increased, and it soon
became the most popular Debian-based Linux distribution available.
Now with more people working on the project than ever before, Ubuntu
continues to see improvement to its core features and hardware support, and
has gained the attention of large organizations worldwide. For example, in
2007 Dell began a collaboration with Canonical to sell computers with Ubuntu
pre-installed. Additionally, in 2005 the French Police began to transition
their entire computer infrastructure to a variant of Ubuntu—a process whith
has reportedly saved them “millions of Euro” in licensing fees for Microsoft
Windows. By the year 2012, the French Police anticipates that all of their
computers will be running Ubuntu. Canonical profits from this arrangement
by providing technical support and custom-built software.
While large organizations often find it useful to pay for support services,
Shuthleworth has promised that the Ubuntu desktop system will always be
free. As of 2010, Ubuntu desktop is installed on nearly 2% of the world’s
computers. This equates to millions of users worldwide, and is growing each
year.

What is Linux?

Ubuntu is built on the foundation of Linux, which is a member of the Unix
family. Unix is one of the oldest types of operating systems and has provided
reliability and security in professional applications for almost half a century.
Many servers around the world that store data for popular websites (such as
YouTube and Google) run some variant of a Unix system.
Linux was designed from the ground up with security and hardware com-
patibility in mind, and is currently one of the most popular Unix-based op-
erating system. One of the benefits of Linux is that it is incredibly flexible
and can be configured to run on almost any device—from the smallest micro-
computers and cellphones to larger super-computers. Initially, Unix was
entirely command line-based until graphical user interfaces (GUIs) began to
emerge in the early 1990s.
These early GUIs were difficult to configure and clunky at best, and gen-
erally only used by seasoned computer programmers. In the past decade,
however, graphical user interfaces have come a long way in terms of usability,
reliability and appearance. Ubuntu is just one of many different Linux dis-
tributions, and uses one of the more popular graphical desktop environments
called GNOME.