Friday, November 4, 2011

A word about Linux, Ubuntu, servers and iFolder


Linux – Linux is an operating system designed after the venerable UNIX operating system. We all know what Windows is, and Apple has it’s MAC OSX, but Linux is open source, which means there are no restrictions on who can develop enhancements or features to the operating system. Linux, which includes Google’s Android, runs on a wide variety of computer hardware, including mobile phones, tablet computers, routers, televisions and many other devices including supercomputers. Most websites in the world run on a Linux or UNIX server.

Ubuntu – Since Linux is open source, there are many different companies which publish their own distribution of the operating system. Novell has their version which is called OpenSUSE. Canonical works with the open source community to develop Ubuntu which is the most widely used version of Linux.

iFolder – iFolder is a system that allows people to easily share folders of any type of files with other users, whether they use the same or different operating systems. Thus, Linux, Windows and Macintosh users can all use iFolder to share files. Although iFolder is easy and in some cases almost seamless to use, supporting it is not easy since there are several components in the iFolder system. The first part is the server software which runs on a Linux.. The second part is the Linux server itself which must run on hardware with a large disk  drive (300GB in our case) to hold the users’ files. The next part of the iFolder system is the client software which runs on user’s computers running Linux, Windows or MAC operating systems. Unfortunately, there is no client software which was designed specifically to run on the Ubuntu OS. the system we use at Whitfield for our computers. There is an iFolder client which was designed for a different Linux distribution and the engineers at the consulting company we use, Revolution Linux*, have gone to great pains to get that client working for the past 2 years. This was the first year that this task proved too much for Revolution Linux and we had to abandon iFolder at the beginning of the school year. We will re-address the iFolder issue at a later date.

*Revolution Linux is a Canadian based firm which has helped us configure our Ubuntu desktop environment for the past 3 years.

No comments:

Post a Comment