Linux
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History
UNIX® was devloped in the late 1960's by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs. Unix became very popular among academic institutions and businesses due to its wide availability and portability. The design of Unix also influenced authors to write Unix-like operating systems.
One so-called Unix-like system was GNU, started in 1984 by Richard Stallman.
MINIX, a Unix-like system intended for academic use, was released by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in 1987. While source code for the system was available, modification and redistribution were restricted. Minix also had a design for 16-bit processors, but in the early 1990's processors with 32-bit architecture became available at a resonable cost.
In April 1991, Linus Torvalds, then 21 years old, began to work on a non-commercial replacement for MINIX while he was attending the University of Helsinki. The embryo, starting with some simple ideas for an operating system, eventually became the Linux kernel.
In August 1991 Linus Torvalds posted the following to to comp.os.minix:
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months [...] Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
[...] It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies). [...] Some of my "C"-files (specifically mm.c) are almost as much assembler as C. [...] Unlike minix, I also happen to LIKE interrupts, so interrupts are handled without trying to hide the reason behind them.
The kernel
The most inner and importand part of a Linux system is of course the kernel. You find the most resent kernels at kernel.org.
A couple of versions found at kernel.org:
| The latest stable version of the Linux kernel: | 2.6.26 |
| The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel: | 2.4.36.6 |
| The latest 2.2 version of the Linux kernel: | 2.2.26 |
Distributions
When most people today talk about Linux they actually talk about a Linux distribution. A distribution is, except the kernel, a bunch of software packages (as many as many thousands) wraped around an installer and configuration packages.
Here are a few of the major Linux distributions:
A far more complete list of Linux distributions can be found at en.wikipedia.org
