The more adventurous Linux enthusiasts have tried unusual Linux distros for many different reasons. Some to find the right UI, some for peace of mind, and some to restore a system. 

What is your favorite unusual Linux distribution?

LinuxPlanet's Carla Schroder has listed her favorite unusual distros, which is led by Red Hat, which would be on the top of many lists. She seems to have a love for no-nonsense and well-maintained distros. There are some surprises in her Top 5 list, so check the insightful article out.

Google's Chrome OS has seen the light of the day, but the question remains: will it find widespread adoption? It's just a browser, a Web, and a few widgets. Everything's on the Web, and the lifeline of computing would be a 3G network, Wi-Fi or any means to get to the Internet. The OS is essentially a watered down version of Linux, and can boot up in a matter of seconds.

It sounds familiar to Sun's network computer concept, with thin clients doing their computing over networks. The concept failed. Google is reinventing the concept and has a big challenge ahead: for the OS to succeed, the company will have to change the way people think.

First of all, to briefly identify myself to my audience, I will be 59 years of age very soon. I was first introduced to computers in 1985 while employed by IBM Corporation. I still have a fondness for DOS and I never cared too much for Windows from its beginning. I discovered Linux about the same time the beta release of Windows 95 (Chicago) came out. I couldn't do anything with Linux then, but my dislike of what Microsoft had to offer kept me coming back for another look. Finally, I think, around 1998 I successfully got a distribution of Slackware up and running on a 386 SX25.

Introduction

to Linux:

It’s a free

operating system available to download but you have to pay a tiny bit to mail

order it or buy it from a company. Linux came into being about 11 years ago- it

was developed by Linus Torvalds of Finland along with a group of programmers

from the open source software movement.

Companies including Oracle, IBM and HP are successfully utilizing open source software-including GPL software-with no harmful side effects or infection of their intellectual property. Further, as others have pointed out, many open source licenses such as the IBM Public License, the MPL, and BSD-type licenses, enable and facilitate the peaceful co-existence of open source and proprietary software in different ways.

Recent public statements by Microsoft executives have cast Linux and the open-source philosophy that underlies it as, at the minimum, bad for competition, and, at worst, a “cancer” to everything it touches.

As more commercial software vendors are exploring the potential benefits of open source, the rhetoric is reaching epic proportions. And with quasi-open-source licenses proliferating, it is becoming increasingly tougher to determine whether or not software is truly open source-and whether or not that matters (beyond purely religious war reasons) to software consumers and developers.

Not many people anywhere, let alone in the open-source world, have heard of the Mettle distribution of Linux. You won't find it in our list of downloadable distributions, or even the huge list maintained by Linux Weekly News. Indeed, it has not generated a sentence's worth of public mention until now.

There's a country song that describes the Linux phenomenon perfectly. It's called "Overnight Sensation," and it just so happens that my old girlfriend, Joni Mehler, wrote it. Everyone should have at least one ex-girlfriend who writes country songs, don't you think? Anyway, maybe you've heard this song. It goes…

"It took 20 long years to be an overnight sensation,

How could overnight take so many years?

Thanks but no thanks. That's what I say to those anonymous crackers who had decided to "help" out by releasing the Cheese Worm last month.

Cheese is certainly a "c00l" hack, but that definitely doesn't make it acceptable or responsible behavior. Visions of bots floating around in the ether waging mighty, but invisible, battles belong in books such as Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," not on production Internet servers.