What is a Distro? How is Ice Cream Made?
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a bowl of ice cream by its diameter?
A: Pi á la mode.
It’s the 4th Friday of the month and you know it’s time for your favorite A Gentle Introduction to Linux for Non-Geeks again! Those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere have just celebrated the official start of summer…ok, many probably didn’t even realize that was an official date, but the rising temperature and the cheerfulness is definitely palpable. I don’t know how you guys mark the beginning of your favorite reason, but I did get myself a triple-scoop ice cream - sesame with honey, chilli with chocolate, plus ginger - on an extra buttery cone. What are your favorite ice cream flavors? Maybe there are regional flavors where you are that you don’t get anywhere else? In Japan, for example, gourmets can enjoy octopus or kelp flavored ice cream, whereas in Taiwan I’ve seen pork flavored and green-tea flavored ice cream. I wonder if you get snail flavored ice cream in France?
There may be thousands of brands of ice cream, but manufacturers all follow the same production process: milk and sweeteners are first agitated and blended in a mixing tank. The mixture is then pasteurized, or, heated and held at a very high temperature to wipe out the bacterias. After that, the mixture is homogenized, with high pressures breaking the fat globules down into small particles so that the ice cream will be smoother and creamier. The mix is then sent to a special freezer, with small air cells whipped in to prevent the mix from becoming an ice cube. At this point, various flavoring ingredients such as nuts, chocolate chips etc. are dropped into the semi-frozen mixture. Once the ice cream is packaged, it’ll be moved into a freezer again to make the the iced cream harder. And that’s about it. Our final product is now ready for storage and distribution!
Using ice cream as an analogy, Linux also has many different manufacturers who produce and brand their own unique flavors. We call these manufacturers “distributions” or simply “distros”. This is how Linux is made: two major ingredients, the Linux Kernel (developed by Linus Torvalds) and the GNU programs (developed by the GNU Project under the leadership of Richard Stallman) are first put together. During pasteurization and homogenization, various “bugs” – that’s Geekspeak for unwanted errors in the program – will be exterminated, and the mixture will be further processed so the two ingredients work smoother with each other. Then each distro puts their own unique flavorings into the mix, including the look and feel of the OS, plus various applications, packages, and lots of other sweet sweet goodies. And that’s where all these funny names come from: they are all different flavors of Linux. Last month we mentioned Dell is now selling PCs with Ubuntu flavored Linux. You might have heard of other popular flavors such as Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Gentoo and Slackware. Today there are more than 300 different flavors of Linux you can choose from. And the best part is, not only can you make your own ice cream at home, you can also make your own Linux system, for free! And that’s why Linux is “free”. It’s not only gratis, it’s also liberated. We’ll talk about more about it next month.
One more thing before I let you guys run outside to get your favorite ice cream: just as nowadays we say “ice cream” instead of “iced cream”, the correct name for Linux is really GNU/Linux. Even if we use the shortened name Linux out of convenience, we should always remember that both the GNU Project and the Linux Kernel are indispensable ingredients of a Linux system. Go get yourself an ice cream already!:)
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