Linux is the creation of Linus Torvalds. Well it was to start with anyway. Now it has had input from programmers all over the world.

Linux is now available in many different forms from many different sources around the web. What do they have in common? They are all open source and many of them are free!

Free? Yes, you just need a quick connection a bit of determination and you can have a free, up-to-date operating system on your computer which will be (generally) more stable than it's Micro$oft Windows counterpart.

There are quite a few variants of Linux around, the majority of which, as I said, are free. You can see a list of "distro's" at www.linux.org. This is the almost official home page for linux.

I run Mandrake 9 as a server here. It runs Apache and Perl (and all the other associated gubbins like Samba etc.) and acts as a test server for our Internet pages. It actaully runs with only a network lead and a power cable attached. All the control is

How many times has it crashed... errrrrr none. No really Linux is very stable, much more so than Windows (in my experience). That's probably one of the main reasons it's used by almoost everyone at some point during their working day, wether they realise it or not. Linux resides on the majority of webservers. The fact that it is open source and very stable makes it ideal.

Ok, so I tried RedHat a while ago and didn't get on with it at all well. I've just installed RedHat 8 on one of the machines, and the install went extremely smoothly. I forgot some components and added them afterwards and it was a peice of cake! I've now installed some extra apps, whcih I downloaded from the net and that went fine too. RedHat.com.

One of the best places I've found with lists of ISO mirrors (sites that have distributions of Linux) on it is here http://www.linuxhelp.net/isos/. Linux is available in quite a few different versions. A lot of these are based on RedHat Linux, Mandrake is one of these.
A good distribution to start with would be either Mandrake or RedHat.

Update 15th May 2004
The RedHat box is now set-up as our main IntraNet server. After routing out all the problems it now runs much faster than the older box.
The old server we had was a 333MHz Intel machine (with an overclock chip on-it) and 64Mb RAM. This was running Mandrake 9.0 (or 9.1 I forget which) to serve as our local web server. Using Samba, Perl and Apache we could run our websites locally in test before uploading them to the internet and have the server space mapped as local drives on our office PC's.
The new server is an AMD K6-3 450MHz cpu with 128Mb ram and a 3Gb disk. It runs the same Samba, Perl and Apache apps, but using the RedHat distro. The root of the server is again mapped as a network drive and the network card in that machine now supports W.O.L. (Wake On Lan) which means we don't hardly ever have to touch the unit as we can start it up remotely and shut it down over Telnet.
   Teething problems...

When I first tried to build the system up as a server I had quite a lot of bother as I tried to install the same Mandrake distro I was farmiliar with. I used this on the old server and whilst it didn't have all the bells and whistles of the newer versions it did what I needed in a relatively fuss-free way. Besides which the box I was installing the software on was hardly state-of-the -art, in fact it's getting on for state-of-the-ark by today's standards. The server has an ATi Rage Fury 32Mb graphics card, which was amazingly powerfull when it came out back in 2000. Now the fact the card is first generation AGP card causes some problems. The drivers are hard to come by for all operating systems and it seems that Mandrake 9.0 doesn't support this card. This is why I had to look at other distributions of Linux and choose RedHat. The initial set-up of the machine, getting Apache running and Telnet access.

Update 22nd May 2005
Slight delay (ahem) in getting another update online. It's been an interesting year in terms of our set-up here. We've moved from the AMD 450MHz machine to a newer 1GHz box, also AMD powered. It's running RedHat 9.0 and seems to be all ok. The set-up has changed quite a bit now, from running just Samba and Apache we now have a MySQL server and PHP in use. The server also has Wake-on-LAN and swap-able drive bays.

The whole unit is in a tower case in a cupboard in the office. We have a KVM switch so can access it directly (as well as via Telnet etc). We only recently added the swap-able drive bays, mainly due problems with hot hard drives. The bays we've gone for are actively cooled, which helps keep things cool.
Another benefit of using this drive configuration is that we can try other operating systems. So far we've seen Linspire 5.0 and Knoppix (more to follow on these).