Linux for Not Yet Techies

What is Linux?

A. Bill Gates' worst nightmare?

B. A revolution in computer operating systems?

C. A Peanuts character misspelled?

D. All of the above.

In 1991 a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland named Linus Torvalds bought a 386 PC and began tinkering with the operating system. Dissatisfied with a scaled down version of UNIX called Minix, he and some friends created the kernel of an operating system that had much of the speed and power of UNIX.

Combining Linus and UNIX of course makes Linux. In early 1994 they came out with Version 1.0. About 125,000 people were using it then.

Amazingly, on only 2 mgs of RAM you could use 1.0 to:

1. Perform true multitasking

2. Accommodate multiple users.

That can mean you can download Linux without paying for it, which most people did until recently. Or, a company such as Red Hat and others can bundle it into a more user-friendly package and charge for that.

But the Linux source code remains open to everybody, so anybody can tinker with it and add to it. This is in big contrast to both Microsoft and Apple, who do not share the source code of their operating systems.

By 1997, an estimated 3,000,000 people were using it. By 1998, 7, 000, 000.

The rest of us probably would have had more problems until the recent commercial forms came out.

Users tend to be fanatic zealots who advocate that it attain world domination. They point to its many advantages over the more well known #1 and #2 operating systems. (Windows and MacIntosh if you couldn't guess. It is now #3.)

It is much more reliable. Reportedly there are systems that have run it for one year continuously -- WITHOUT A CRASH! Those of us used to rebooting Windows at least once a night understand the appeal of that.

It is also good for network systems. Networks are becoming increasingly important and common in businesses and now even in homes. It can cut the cost of networking a lot.

Linux is also highly scalable. This means that you can actually create a supercomputer by hooking up a string of other computers -- even 386s via parallel processing. This Extreme Linux System is also known as Beowulf.

Ordinarily you would not expect an operating system that is so relatively recent to be as stable and reliable as it is. However, it had the advantage of being based on UNIX, which goes back nearly 30 years.

You can use it in its character cell mode, which is text commands, analogous to DOS, or use its X Window System which is a graphical user interface analogous to you know what.