Day 3 started well when some nice man who must remain nameless kindly offered me an old Celeron desktop (oooh – who could that be?) which would be ideal as my new Linux web server. Buoyed by this early stroke of good fortune I spent my lunch break (of course!) looking for a copy of Linux that I could get my hands on. Not having a clue where to start, I simply typed “Linux” into Google. The first result was www.linux.org which provided a baffling wealth of information about Linux in general but little in the way of specifics. For example, the main page has a big button on it called “Download” but when I hopped to that page I couldn’t find anything to actually download. When I slowed down to understand it all a bit better I realised that the key thing you had to find was an ISO image, a file which can be burned to a CD resulting in a proper install set. Back to Google and I typed “Linux ISO” which brought back a first result of www.linuxiso.org. Two hits out of two and, despite some unnecessary messing around looking for phantom downloads on the wrong site, I felt I was making good progress. Now the linux ISO site is a marvel to the Linux newbie for many reasons but it was at this point (yes I realise that I’m slow) that I had an epiphany about what was meant by Linux “distributions” and the whole OpenSource phenomenon. For the realisation that finally broke through my Microsoft-conditioned skull was that Linux exists purely as source code which is freely available to anyone. The resulting dynamic is that different companies take this code and mould it, tweak it, specialise it, add different support for different applications and generally hack it and cut it around to suit specific uses. So there is not one Linux; there are hundreds. Each version or flavour is called a “distribution”. جدول اليورو ٢٠٢١ The problem now facing me was in deciding which distribution I should choose. المتأهلين لكأس العالم للأندية 2022 The Linux ISO site lists no fewer than 15 “most popular” distributions and although one or two of the names were vaguely familiar, the one which rang the most bells was Red Hat. I looked at the description of Red Hat which affirmed that it was the best known distribution but worryingly also added that support was being withdrawn soon, turning Red Hat into a commercial product (is that allowed in the OpenSource world) and spinning off a freebie version called, rather inelegantly, “The Fedora Project”. That didn’t sound too clever and it also mentioned something about being designed for an i386 chip. It turns out that most of the hardcore Linuxes are done this way to provide the greatest level of support. However, if you have the source code you can recompile it for your specific machine. Clearly for a newbie like myself this was utterly terrifying and totally out of the question. الفرق المتأهلة لكأس العرب Luckily Linux ISO also provide a filter so you can see which versions work on an i586 platform. I applied this and was left with nine contenders.