8 interesting facts about Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu

1. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word translated to "humanity towards others", which aptly describes the open source community spirit behind Ubuntu project.

2. The Ubuntu symbol in the official logo is called "Circle of Friends", and represents: freedom, collaboration, precision and reliability.

3. The version number of a particular Ubuntu release is actually the release year and month. So for example, the very first Ubuntu release is 4.10 because it was released in October, 2004. The recent Ubuntu 13.10 was released in October, 2013. A new release of Ubuntu becomes available every six months, and every fourth release becomes a long-term-support (LTS) version.

4. According to DistroWatch, a total of 131 Linux distributions are based on Ubuntu, of which 77 are currently active.

5. According to Ubuntu popularity contest, dpkg package is ranked first in terms of the number of people who use the package regularly, and ncurses-base package is number one in terms of the number of people who installed the package.

6. Since late 2008, the Wikipedia infrastructure has been powered by LAMP stack running on Ubuntu servers.

7. Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel can run simultaneously in parallel on the same machine using a software called Cooperative Linux (coLinux).

8. IBM choose Linux for what is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Sequoia, due in 2011.