Ubuntu is a Linux OS distribution that is rising in popularity and garnering mainstream notice largely due to it’s easy installation but also due to its sponsorship by Canonical Ltd, which is owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth who you may recall is the second self-funded space tourist (He founded internet security company Thawte and sold it to VeriSign for somewhere around $575 million).

I won’t get into the specifics of Linux or the various distributions, but suffice to say that it’s largely been a world unto its own – namely one dominated by techies. The pros of the open source community, stability, non-Big Corporate owned, and of course free hasn’t been enough to pull the mainstream from the mighty cons of a difficult installation and configuration and lack of codec & peripheral support. Linux always seemed like a good idea, but the reality was if you’re not a network admin or serious techie than don’t bother. This is all changing as more and more development is being done to bring Linux to the masses.

Ubuntu is at the forefront of this movement by focusing on making the installation and configuration steps painless and for pre-configuring software options and hardware support. You can read up more here and here and check out Walt Mossberg’s nice neutral review of Ubuntu for the non-techie (and the comments to his article offer some good commentary…definitely worth a browse).

I have to admit I’ve always been interested in Linux but even I was wary of all the issues surrounding it. I am ready to dive in with Ubuntu, though, and a large part of that is the “try it first” mentality of the installation process. You can run Ubuntu completely off the CD-ROM without installing anything! So you can fire it up on your current Windows PC and check it out for yourself. If you like it and want to keep it, it will walk you through the installation process and even keep your Windows installation. How cool is that? Cool enough to convince me to try it. I will post more as I try to revive an old laptop with Ubuntu!

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