Prejudices and opinions aside, at some point in your career you'll be asked to select a viable Linux distribution for your corporate network. How will you choose? Here are 5 ways.

The first thing that puzzles someone new to Linux is the concept of Linux distribution. When you want to get Linux on your computer, what you install is actually a Linux "distribution" that contains a Linux kernel (see here for a definition of kernel) and some applications like Firefox (web browser) and Open Office (word processor and spreadsheet).

Pardus Corporate 2 is the corporate (professional) edition of Pardus, the Linux distribution developed and maintained by the National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), Turkey. This is the first beta, released on December 13. The final release will be made available on February 16, 2011 (see the release schedule).

I foresee companies starting to take a serious look at Linux for their corporate server and desktop infrastructures. As our economy slides quietly into recession, corporate check writers are going to engage to CIOs and technical managers to find ways to lower costs for power, cooling, software, and hardware. Turning to Linux will be a natural part of that mission.

Many technologists use a Linux distribution as their corporate desktop or laptop solution. These users often have a few common requirements that apply to a large group of users. These requirements typically are:

- Mobility
- Encryption
- Common Authentication
- Firewall

Sun finally set in the English empire; wind of change is blowing hard and the inevitable has happened. A non-corporate backed distribution, PCLinuxOS, has displaced the mighty Ubuntu as the top ranked distribution on 3 months page hit ranking at distrowatch.

The only problem I see with it is, which one are you gonna choose for THE distribution? Will it be SUSE, Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, or Slackware? Since it has to be a top-level distribution and not a derivative, it will have to be one of those. Let's examine those choices.

Element is a lightweight Linux distribution for use on a home theater PC (HTPC). It comes with most of the same video-playback applications one would find in a modern desktop distribution, but the development team has put considerable effort into wrapping the applications in an environment that is easy to navigate from across the room...

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.