What is Linux ?
Back in August of 1991, Linux Torvalds began what we know today as Linux (
pronounced lynn-ucks) as a project while was a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki. He had wanted to implement an improved (free) Minix for his x86 PC. On October 5th of 1991, he posted the following message to comp.os.minix:
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)Apparently someone was interested, because shortly thereafter, there were more developers than Linus even knew about. Today, with a firm base of at least 10 million users worldwide, Linux is growing exponentially as programmers, enthusiasts, and end-users exchange thoughts, implement ideas, contribute code, and cooperate in the phenomenon known as Open Source to produce the operating system known as Linux. And it has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management and TCP/IP networking. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it......
What kinda hardware does Linux require ?
It was first developed for 386/486-based PCs. These days it also runs on ARMs, DEC Alphas, SUN Sparcs, M68000 machines (like Atari and Amiga), MIPS and PowerPC, and others.
More information on Linus Torvalds biography page click here.
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