From the course: Practical Linux for Network Engineers: Part 1

Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Practical Linux for Network Engineers: Part 1

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Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint

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(light cheerful music) - [Instructor] Another important Linux distribution family is the Debian family. This is the family that Ubuntu is based on. And is, again, the focus of this course. There are different versions of Ubuntu including server and desktop which we'll use as part of this course. Debian has been around for a long time. It's a free operating system, and is very popular in places such as universities, or other educational environments where support is not important. If you need support don't use Debia.n Look at using Ubuntu. Canonical is a company that provides commercial support for the Ubuntu operating system. So if you need commercial support you can get that from Canonical. Ubuntu by default doesn't come with support but you can get commercial support from Canonical or Canonical, if you prefer pronouncing it that way. So just like with Red Hat Linux if you want commercial support for Linux but you prefer using the Debian family of Linux, you can get commercial support with Ubuntu. You'll again find that Ubuntu is very popular in software defined networking environments. A lot of software defined networking controllers run on Ubuntu. A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months. So on their website if I go to Downloads, Server at the time of this recording, we can see Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and 17.04. This is the latest version of Ubuntu server and only provides support, security, and maintenance updates for nine months. The long term support version of Ubuntu provides support for five years. At the time of this recording, support will be available until April 2021. In production you don't want to use the latest version of Ubuntu server. You wanna use LTS or long term support. That means that you're going to get patches, support and help for at least seven years. So you're guaranteed support for this version until April 2021. That's why you'll find as an an example that a lot of SDN controllers and production systems are running on older versions of Ubuntu. They have guaranteed support for a number of years. So it makes sense to develop, deploy, and use Ubuntu LTS and not the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu. In this course we're gonna use Ubuntu server 16.04 LTS. The version that's available when you watch the video may be different but don't worry, we're gonna use basic commands, so the setup in your lab will either be exactly the same or very similar. Ubuntu LTS is released every two years. Again, 16.04 is the latest version available at the time of this recording. The next version of LTS will be available in 2018, and that will be 18.04. If that's the latest version available, when you watch this video, then use that version. The differences with what we're doing in the lab will either be very minor, or there will be no differences between what I'm doing and what you're able to do in a lab. Another important distribution is Linux Mint. A lot of people will recommend that you use Linux Mint. It's also very popular and it's derived from Ubuntu.

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