Linus Torvalds, who was then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, developed Linux in 1991. He released it for free on the Internet. Due to the far reach of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project, Linux popularity increased rapidly, with utilities developed and released for free online. A commercial version of Unix was released by RedHat in the early 1990’s (combining the OS with technical support and documentation) and the popularity of Linux continued to skyrocket.
A system is termed UNIX only if it complies fully with (and is certified by) the Single Unix Specification (SUS) standards. Similar systems that do not comply fully or are not certified, such as Linux, are termed “Unix-like” operating systems
More : .http://www.linux.org/info/
Linux could be considered a good operating system due to the following:
ReplyDelete• Linux is a complete operating system that is:
• stable - the crash of an application is much less likely to bring down the operating system under Linux, also the architecture is very clear and suits any research.. Gives the freedom to breathe on our own..
• reliable - Linux servers are often up for hundreds of days compared with the regular reboots required with a Windows system. Also Windows provides an OS where we have to blindly believe the internals while writing our Application and there are common backdoor attacks, whereas Linux offers the source code and you can customize the way you want without any worries.
• Comes with a complete development environment, including C, C++, Fortran compilers, toolkits such as Qt and scripting languages such as Perl, Awk and sed. A C compiler for Windows alone would set you back hundreds of dollars.
• Excellent networking facilities: allowing you to share CPUs, share modems etc; all of which are not included or available with Windows 95.
• The ideal environment to run servers such as a web server (e.g. Apache), or an FTP server.
• Supports multiple processors as standard.
• True multi-tasking; the ability to run more than one program at the same time.
• An excellent window system called X; the equivalent of Windows but much more flexible.
• Most movies special effects are produced on Linux systems
• Financial activies such as banking and stock monitoring are happening only in Linux systems
• The United state government and military extensively uses Linux systems.
Some of the common Linux distributions
• Read Hat – very popular
• Slack Ware
• Debian/GNU
• Caldera
• SUSE
Limitations - Linux
• Configuring device drivers is very complex
• Not much support from Help files or user manual for beginners to understand Linux.