It seems as if every day a new Linux distribution emerges into the world. True, it can lead to some confusion in the marketplace and fragmentation of the Linux brand name, but open source is all about confusing the end user by having five equally good products that do the same thing, so I decided to go down to my local CompAmerica and check out the selection.

I was met at the door by a personal distribution consultant who declared it was her duty to match me up with the perfect distro for my needs, personality, complexion, and the current season.

"If you're going for that corporate shark image, I'd suggest either Red Hat Enterprise or Novell's SUSE. Red Hat is a little more conservative; Novell gives a bit of a European flavor, a little more panache."

I shook my head, "How about something with a wilder image?"

She smiled and gestured me over to another table. "Then you'd want Debian, very James Dean, rebel without a cause." She indicated a thousand little bottles sitting on the counter. "The only problem is, you have to mix it yourself from all these individual ingredients, so it can be a little time-consuming in the morning."

I frowned. "Sounds too complicated, what else do you have?"

"Oh lots," she replied cheerfully. "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?"

I looked at her quizzically. "Why does it matter?"

"Well, if you're a Republican, we have a specially designed distro. It gives all the runtime to a few large powerful processes, and lets the smaller processes fend for themselves with whatever idle CPU cycles remain, although the documentation claims that the smaller processes eventually see the benefit of this strategy. It also prevents you from killing any process that hasn't been running for at least nine months, but lets you kill other processes, even if it later turns out it was the wrong one."

She brought me over to another display. "As an alternative, we have the Democratic distro. It disables the nice command, so you can't give any process more priority than any other one. The developers say that it isn't fair to single out any one process for special treatment. It has been getting a little cumbersome lately, however. The first release was a single CD; the second took up two. Now we're up to 27, although I can't say it does all that much more than the first release did."

She walked down another aisle to a table festooned with evergreen wreaths. "We also have the Martha Stewart Living distro. Each CD is made from beach sand, hand-gathered by young Italian girls on the coast of Tuscany. The box is formed from homemade paper made from rose petals. None of the packages, including the kernel, are compiled; you do it yourself when you install it. And the latest release has a desktop link to the 'Girls Behind Bars' Web site."

I was getting a bit overwhelmed by the choices, but she doggedly brought me down another row of tables. "We have the John Ashcroft distro. It randomly changes your desktop color to red, orange, or yellow. It also sends every keystroke and mouse-click directly to the Department of Justice." I looked down at the box, which had a large banner running along the top of the front: WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE?

I put the box down quickly and backed away, but she was already leading me further into the maze. "We have an RIAA distro; it turns on the microphone on your system and analyzes the sounds in the room. If it catches you humming or singing a song, it immediately sends a lawsuit to the printer demanding $3,000. Or how about the SCO distro? It searches all the files on your local area network looking for any document with the letters SCO in it, like ones in the words scones, scow, scowl, etc. If it finds any, it accuses you of stealing the document from SCO and sues you in federal court."

By now, I was nervously looking for the exit, but she just kept going deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. "We have the Microsoft distro, it randomly crashes, comes preinstalled with viruses, and sends all your personal information to businesses throughout the world." She paused for a second to look more closely at the box. "Oh sorry! This is Windows XP, must have been misshelved."

At this point, she was practically dragging me through the store, as I struggled to escape. "The Survivor distro, each week the least popular module is voted out of the kernel. The Disney distro, it takes all your existing software, changes it slightly, gives it a happier ending, and resells it as its own. The Paris Hilton distro only lets you access clothing and jewelry stores from your browser. The Sopranos distro comes with a free sample of Prozac and a baseball bat. The Lord of the Rings distro slowly sucks the life out of you, unless you can throw it into a burning volcano...oh sorry, that's another copy of Windows XP... Hey, come back!!"

She was too late; I had escaped. With the clean air of the outside world in my lungs, I made for my car. But still, the nameless horror lives in me, the unholy variety. I went home and snuggled up with my Red Hat distro CDs as a security blanket. Although I hear Fedora is pretty hot...