What Is Linux?

What is Linux? Linux is an open source (free, and its source code is openly available) operating system written by Linus Torvalds. Linus wrote the OS because the currently available operating systems didnt fit his personal needs. Linux is not alone though, there are other open source OSes out there, most noteably FreeBSD. Here are some advantages of Linux:

  • Linux is free, you can download it from any distrobution (distro for short) that has a FTP site, which is required by the licensing requirements of Linux, it has to be freely distributed.
  • Linux is powerful, it is able to run on a 80386 machine, which varies from 25 MHz to 33 MHz.
  • Linux is most famous for its networking capabilities, it usually ships with ftp, smtp, ssh, and other services.
  • Linux is stable, it is designed to take the most hard-core hits, where other OSes, such as Windows 9x, NT, DOS, and XP will crash if a program that is tied too tightly to the kernel crashes.
  • Linux is customizable. You can customize practically every aspect of the OS, and if you dont have a feature you want, you can modify the source if you choose.
  • Linux comes with its source code, in C.
  • Linux has extensive programming support, with languages such as Perl, Python, and tk/tkl usually shipped with the OS.
  • Linux has a broad support of hardware, as opposed to Free BSD, which supports both less hardware, and software.
  • Linux can be used to communicate with other OSes, such as the Mac OS, Windows (via Samba), DOS, NT, Sun OS, and the list goes on and on.
  • Linux is secure, the few patches that are required (either for the kernel or for the services) are issued within days of an exploit report.
  • Linux is growing fastly, gaining new users each and every day.

    Linux is not alone in these aspects, however. There are other OSes, such as UNIX that have some of these features. Here is a short history of UNIX and LINUX:

    UNIX was first thought of in the AT&T labs, two programmers wanted to build an OS that would allow them to play a game over a network. The result is UNIX, which was quickly claimed by AT&T, who had legal ownership of the worker's OS, because they were being paid by AT&T when they created the OS, therefore it was their intellectual property. This outraged the programmers, and so they made a free version of UNIX, which later matured into another OS, which was used by Linus Torvalds. He soon grew tired of this OS, and completely re-wrote it, resulting in LINUX. There are still variants of the origional UNIX around, most noteably SCO UNIX (Santa Cruz Operation UNIX), and the aforementioned FreeBSD. Mac OS X is based on Linux as well. Linux is pronounced many ways, but the most common form of pronunciation is "Linnucks".

    So how can you get Linux? There are several distrobutions to consider, personally I recommend Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, and Slackware Linux. If you would like to get a view of most of the free OSes, then I recomend that you visit FreeOS.org.

    Before you install Linux, you should make sure that all of your hardware is fully supported, which can be accomplished by visiting your distro's site and searching for hardware compatibility. Most "controllered" hardware is supported in Linux, and there is some software-based hardware that is supported. One of the worst problems with installing Linux is lack of supported hardware. Luckily, even some of the most generic hardware is supported.

    If you have any further questions about Linux, feel free to email me at cpace@hnsg.net.