INTRODUCTION TO LINUX

[user1]

" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".

..Mahatma Gandhi..

The mighty magic of Linux as seen today depicts a similar path on the onward march to the hearts and minds of the techies and the industrialist. Linux a UNIX like operating system, despite many disregard and ridicule had succeeded in registering a unique identity over properatory software as an open source product.

The year 1969 witnessed the first version of UNIX as Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, system engineers at AT&T’s Bell Lab created a maiden form. Many issues and Bugs of the maiden version have gone through several revisions and it was by 1977, the interactive system corporation has made this commercially available. At the same time a team from the University of California at Berkeley was working to improve UNIX. In 1977 it released the first Berkeley Software Distribution, which became known as BSD. Over time this won favour through innovations such as the C shell.

The scenario of 70’s witnessed a multi-flavor development of AT&T version. The 1978 release of Version 7 included the Bourne Shell for the first time. By 1983 commercial interest was growing and Sun Microsystems produced a UNIX workstation. System V appeared, directly descended from the original AT&T UNIX and the prototype of the more widely used variant today.

Richard Stallman made the Initial Announcement of the GNU Project in September 1983. A longer version called the GNU Manifesto was published in March 1985. The GNU operating system is a complete free software system, upward-compatible with Unix. The word “free” in “free software” pertains to freedom, not price. You may or may not pay a price to get GNU software. Either way, once you have the software you have four specific freedoms in using it. The freedom to run the program as you wish; the freedom to copy the program and give it away to your friends and co-workers; the freedom to change the program as you wish, by having full access to source code; the freedom to distribute an improved version and thus help build the community.

Linux is a Unix-like computer Operating System (or OS) that uses the Linux kernel. Linux started out as a personal computer system used by individuals, and has since gained the support of several large corporations, such as Sun Microsystems, HP and IBM. It is now used mostly as a server operating system, with some large organizations using an enterprise version for desktops. Linux is a prime example of open-source development, which means that the source code is available freely for anyone to use.

Linus Torvalds, who was then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, developed Linux in 1991. He released it for free on the Internet. Due to the far reach of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project, Linux popularity increased rapidly, with utilities developed and released for free online. A commercial version of Unix was released by RedHat in the early 1990’s (combining the OS with technical support and documentation) and the popularity of Linux continued to skyrocket.

[linuxuser]

Nice article regarding the history of linux