Administrative utilities -- Including hundreds (perhaps thousands) of commands and
graphical windows to do such things as add users, manage disks, monitor the network,
install software, and generally secure and manage your computer.
Applications -- Although no Linux distribution includes all of them, there are literally
thousands of games, office productivity tools, Web browsers, chat windows, multimedia
players, and other applications available for Linux.
Programming tools -- Including programming utilities for creating applications and
libraries for implementing specialty interfaces.
Server features -- Enabling you to offer services from your Linux computer to another
computer on the network. In other words, while Linux includes Web browsers to view
Web pages, it can also be the computer that serves up Web pages to others. Popular
server features include Web, mail, database, printer, file, DNS, and DHCP servers.
Once Linus Torvalds and friends had a working Linux kernel, pulling together a complete open
source operating system was possible because so much of the available "free" software was:
Covered by the GNU Public License (GPL) or similar license -- That allowed the
entire operating system to be freely distributed, provided guidelines were followed relat-
ing to how the source code for that software was made available going forward (see
www·gnu·org/licenses/gpl.html
).
Based on UNIX-like systems -- Clones of virtually all the other user-level components
of a UNIX system had been created. Those and other utilities and applications were built
to run on UNIX or other UNIX-like systems.
Linux has become one of the most popular culminations of the open source software movement.
But the traditions of sharing code and building communities that made Linux possible started
years before Linux was born. You could argue that it began in a comfortable think tank known as
Bell Laboratories.
Exploring Linux History
Some histories of Linux begin with this message posted by Linus Torvalds to the
comp.os.minix
newsgroup on August 25, 1991:
Hello everybody out there using 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) . . .
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
8
Linux First Steps
Part I
