What’s Linux? 

Linux is a flavour of UNIX, an operating system (underlying software that provides an interface between a computer’s hardware and its applications) developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people starting in 1969. Linux was originally developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Linux is now being developed with the help of many UNIX programmers across the Internet under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone.

Linux’s stability, functionality and availability, has made it very popular worldwide and a vast number of software programmers have taken Linux’s source code and adapted it to meet individual needs. At this time, there are dozens of ongoing projects for porting Linux to various hardware configurations and purposes. In addition, the source code for nearly any Linux program is freely available (and often included by default). This not only means that bugs are discovered and corrected almost immediately, but development of software proceeds at a much faster pace than can be found even in extremely successful commercial software companies.

So, who owns this much talked about Operating System? Everybody! Who controls it? We all do! Linux is not owned by any one corporation or person, but is instead built and owned by the same cooperative spirit that built the Internet. This phenomenon is called Open Source and is the subject of much discussion and amazement in the computer business world. From the beginning, when Linus Torvalds first created Linux and shared it at no cost with world at large, Linux has been open for anyone to contribute to and improve on. Even if you don’t program, you can still send your feedback to the developers for consideration. The most popular web server on the internet, Apache, is free and licensed under a similar agreement as Linux.

The Linux System

Linux has long been praised for its stability - Linux servers have been known to run for months or even years at a time without crashing, freezing or having to be rebooted. Because it is extremely secure compared to other platforms, viruses for Linux essentially do not exist. Linux machines are also known to be extremely fast, because the operating system is very efficient at managing resources such as memory, CPU power and disk space. More of the Web than one might expect is actually powered by older machines running Linux and Apache web server, while NASA, Scandia, Fermilabs and others have built very powerful yet inexpensive supercomputers by creating clusters of Linux boxes running in parallel.

The Linux kernel is the heart of the operating system code which runs the whole computer. The kernel is under constant development and is always available in both the latest stable release and the latest experimental release. The kernel design is modular, so that the actual OS code is very small yet able to load whatever functionality it needs when it needs it, and then frees the memory afterwards. Because of this, the kernel remains small and fast yet highly extensible. Other operating systems slow the computer down and waste memory by loading everything all the time, whether you need it or not. Linux systems excel in many areas, ranging from end user concerns such as stability, speed and ease of use, to serious concerns such as development and networking. Today, Linux even offers a variety of commercial packages and office suites which can import and export files from other platforms, including Windows and MacOS.

You Have a Choice!

It’s most likely that all of your Windows content files (such as Microsoft Word, Excel and others, will open and run on a Linux based system. You may have to learn some different screen layouts, but for the most part the GUI (Graphical User Interface) isn’t so different from what you’re used to. Linux has at least a dozen different highly configurable graphical interfaces (known as window managers) which run on top of XFree86, a free implementation of the X Window System. The most popular window managers at the moment are Windowmaker and KDE (the K Desktop Environment).

Linux is a complete multitasking, multi-user operating system. This means that many users can be logged into the same machine at once, running multiple programs simultaneously. Netscape and other web browsers are available for Linux, as well as word processors, graphics programs, spreadsheets and a rapidly growing list of other software and games (the Linux Game Tome lists over 230 entries), much of which is either free or low-cost.

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.