Linux has its roots in a student project. In 1992, an undegraduate called Linus Torvalds was studying computer science in Helsinki, Finland. Like most computer science courses, a big component of it was taught on ( and about) Unix. Unix was the wonder operating system of the 1970s and 1980s: both a textbook example of the principles of operating system design, and sufficiently robust to be the standart OS in engineering and scientific computing.
Annoyed by the shortcomings of Minix ,Linus set out to write his own 'kernel' - the core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes sure everithing keeps running. He used the GNU programming tools developed by Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. When he'd written a basic kernel, he released the source code to the Linux kernel on the Internet.
Source code is important. It's the original from which compiled programs are generated. If you don't have the source code to a program, you can't modify it to fx bugs or add new features. Most software companies won't sell you their source code, or will only do so for an eyewatering price, because they belive than if they make it available it will destroy their revenue stream.
Programmeres began using Linux. They found that it didn't do things they wanted it to do - so they fixed it. And where they improved it, they sent the imrovements to Linus, who rolled them into the kerne. And Linux began to grow.
There's a term for this model of software development; it's called Open Source. Anyone can contribute to it. If you use it heavily you may want to extend or develop or fix bugs in it - and it is so easy to give your fixes back to the community that most people do so.
An operating system on it's own isn't a lot of use; but Linux was purposefully designed as a near-clon of Unix, and there is a lot of software out there than is free and was designed to compile on Linux. By about 1992, the first 'distributions' appeared.
A distribution is the Linux-user term for a complete operating system kit, complete with the utilities and applications you need to make it do useful things - command interpreters, programming tools, text editors, typesetting tools, and graphical user interfaces based on the X windowing system. X is a standard in academic and scientific computing. It's a complex distributed windowing system on which people imlement graphical interfaces like KDE and Gnome.
As more and more people got to know about Linux, some of them began to port the Linux kernel to run on non-standart computers. Because it's free, Linux now the widelyported operating system there is.
Annoyed by the shortcomings of Minix ,Linus set out to write his own 'kernel' - the core of an operating system that handles memory allocation, talks to hardware devices, and makes sure everithing keeps running. He used the GNU programming tools developed by Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. When he'd written a basic kernel, he released the source code to the Linux kernel on the Internet.
Source code is important. It's the original from which compiled programs are generated. If you don't have the source code to a program, you can't modify it to fx bugs or add new features. Most software companies won't sell you their source code, or will only do so for an eyewatering price, because they belive than if they make it available it will destroy their revenue stream.
Programmeres began using Linux. They found that it didn't do things they wanted it to do - so they fixed it. And where they improved it, they sent the imrovements to Linus, who rolled them into the kerne. And Linux began to grow.
There's a term for this model of software development; it's called Open Source. Anyone can contribute to it. If you use it heavily you may want to extend or develop or fix bugs in it - and it is so easy to give your fixes back to the community that most people do so.
An operating system on it's own isn't a lot of use; but Linux was purposefully designed as a near-clon of Unix, and there is a lot of software out there than is free and was designed to compile on Linux. By about 1992, the first 'distributions' appeared.
A distribution is the Linux-user term for a complete operating system kit, complete with the utilities and applications you need to make it do useful things - command interpreters, programming tools, text editors, typesetting tools, and graphical user interfaces based on the X windowing system. X is a standard in academic and scientific computing. It's a complex distributed windowing system on which people imlement graphical interfaces like KDE and Gnome.
As more and more people got to know about Linux, some of them began to port the Linux kernel to run on non-standart computers. Because it's free, Linux now the widelyported operating system there is.
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