[ Ubuntu-BD ] The Visual History of Ubuntu

[Russell John]

While Debian has been around for over a decade, Gentoo for five years,
and Mandriva/Mandrake for nearly nine years, in less than three years
of existence Ubuntu has received the most attention and generated the
greatest amount of publicity in the Linux limelight. Why is that? In
this article we will be taking a look back at all of the Ubuntu
releases to date and exploring how this Linux distribution has evolved
so quickly over its short lifespan.

Founded in 2004 as the no-name-yet.com project, Ubuntu was the
brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu is funded by Canonical
Limited, which runs off of Mark Shuttleworth's dime, to work on Ubuntu
as well as other free software projects. Most are familiar with Mark
either due to his space tourism expedition or from starting Thawte.
The name Ubuntu was chosen to be representative of the Free Software
and open-source development model. Ubuntu is based upon Debian
-unstable. With one exception to date, all Ubuntu releases have been
based upon a six month development cycle that aligns with GNOME
releases.

In less than three years of existence, Ubuntu has outpaced Fedora,
Debian, SuSE, and other Linux distributions for the number one spot on
DistroWatch as well as having sported several other awards. Ubuntu has
also been a popular topic of discussion for Linux users on the social
networking web-site Digg. Among the attributing factors to the success
of Ubuntu has been Mark Shuttleworth's involvement and funding,
regular releases, ease of use, choice of packages, and the community
that has formed. For assisting those on slower Internet connections,
Ubuntu will even ship Ubuntu-loaded CDs to users around the world who
request this free media and they have been doing this since the
beginning.

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http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=9205