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History
of Linux
Linux was born out of fun and boredom according to Linux torvlads, the
creator of Linux. He was also very disappointed that there were no Unix
variants that he can work on his cheap Intel based PC (Personal Computer).
At that time the UNIX machine were very expensive and only large corporations
and government entities were able to afford them such as Universities,
Research and Development Labs and etc. At that time, he found a Unix variant
called Minix. He was not also satisfied with the performance of Minix and
decided to create the heart of operating system called Kernel by himself
which will run on Intel based chips which are cheaper. He called his kernel
Linux (LInus's uNIX). The first stable release was published on May of
1991 on the Internet.
Today
Linux
Linux is mostly runs by IT professionals (and wannabies) who deals with
systems in day to day basic. Linux has majorily sweeten the hearts of System
Administrators and Network managers. The main attraction of Linux is being
able to run on many platforms with many different environments. The last
time I checked, Linux runs on Motorola, Intel x86, Intel IA64, Sparc, Digital
Alpha, HP Alpha, S390 IBM mainframes and many more. And the best of all,
all Linux distributions came with source code (or able to download from
its original supplier's web site) so that you can see yourself for backdoors,
bugs and broken functions given the fact that you have enough aptitude.
Then Linux caught on with Workstations and desktop users under the same
ground. People trust your peer that they will review the source codes for
them so that they can get from their trust source rather than from some
sales person from some company who you never met. That's also the reason
why we have so many distributions with little differences. People complaining
it and I shook my head. Decades of Micro$oft's dominance in the PC software
business has left people with little knowledge of software system fundamentals.
Linux
Kernel
The latest stable Linux kernel is 2.4.0 and it was released on January
4, 2001. The most significant improvement include redundant file systems
support, many USB bus and 3D video support. You can download your kernel
source for your distro here.
Kernel source download
Kernel source with RPM for RPM based systems ( Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake, etc..)
Kernel source with DEB for Debian based Systems ( Debian GNU/Linux, Storm, Corel, Libranet, etc..)
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| Version 1.0.0 | 01-14-2001 | The initial release of the document. |
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