A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. They are often obtained from the website of each distribution, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to servers and powerful supercomputers.
Installation of a computer program, is the act of making the program ready for execution. Installation refers to the particular configuration of software or hardware with a view to making it usable with the computer. A soft or digital copy of the piece of software (program) is needed to install it. There are different processes of installing a piece of software (program). Because the process varies for each program and each computer, programs often come with an installer, a specialised program responsible for doing whatever is needed for the installation. Installation may be part of a larger software deployment process.
Anaconda is a free and open-source system installer for Linux distributions.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is a specification that defines the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting the computer hardware and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of firmware that implement the specification are AMI Aptio, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, InsydeH2O. UEFI replaces the BIOS which was present in the boot ROM of all personal computers that are IBM PC compatible, although it can provide backwards compatibility with the BIOS using CSM booting. Intel developed the original Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification. Some of the EFI's practices and data formats mirror those of Microsoft Windows. In 2005, UEFI deprecated EFI 1.10.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates a computer's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.
In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a device mapper framework that provides logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Most modern Linux distributions are LVM-aware to the point of being able to have their root file systems on a logical volume.
AppArmor is a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs' capabilities with per-program profiles. Profiles can allow capabilities like network access, raw socket access, and the permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. AppArmor supplements the traditional Unix discretionary access control (DAC) model by providing mandatory access control (MAC). It has been partially included in the mainline Linux kernel since version 2.6.36 and its development has been supported by Canonical since 2009.
The company Zenoss, Inc. was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company develops hybrid IT monitoring and analytics software.
This is a comparison of notable free and open-source configuration management software, suitable for tasks like server configuration, orchestration and infrastructure as code typically performed by a system administrator.
Wubi is a free software Ubuntu installer, that was the official Windows-based software, from 2008 until 2013, to install Ubuntu from within Windows, to a single file within an existing Windows partition.
The Red Hat Kickstart installation method is used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related Linux distributions to automatically perform unattended operating system installation and configuration. Red Hat publishes Cobbler as a tool to automate the Kickstart configuration process.
oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.
Spacewalk is open-source systems management software for system provisioning, patching and configuration licensed under the GNU GPLv2.
The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free open-source software project which develops a range of Debian-based pre-packaged server software appliances. Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a virtual machine, in cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services or installed in physical computers.
Linux Containers (LXC) is an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a control host using a single Linux kernel.
cgroups is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage of a collection of processes.
In computing, Red Hat Satellite is a systems-management product by the company Red Hat which allows system administrators to deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) hosts.
Ansible is a suite of software tools that enables infrastructure as code. It is open-source and the suite includes software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionality.
Foreman is an open source complete life cycle systems management tool for provisioning, configuring and monitoring of physical and virtual servers. Foreman has deep integration to configuration management software, with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt and other solutions through plugins, which allows users to automate repetitive tasks, deploy applications, and manage change to deployed servers.
Fully Automated Installation is a group of Shell and Perl scripts that install and configure a complete Linux distribution quickly on a large number of computers. It's the oldest automated deployment system for Debian.
