Summary

Now that we've discussed the history of Linux, along with several of the main distributions, I hope you are in a better position to appreciate the history and the central importance of the operating systems in our society. In particular, I hope that you have some good criteria to help you choose a distro for your infrastructure.

In this book, we'll choose Ubuntu as our distribution. It's a free distribution, which, in its LTS version, has an OS that we can depend on being supported as you work through the various scenarios, builds, and examples that we'll discuss. It's also the distribution that is native to Windows (in Windows services for Linux). This makes it an easy distro to become familiar with, even if you don't have server or workstation hardware to spare or even a virtualization platform to test with.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss getting your Linux server or workstation on the network. We'll illustrate working with the local interfaces and adding IP addresses, subnet masks, and any routes required to get your Linux host working in a new or existing network.