In 1991 the main operating systems available in the PC world were DOS and Apple. Unix existed, but was too expensive for PC users. However, college professor Andrew Tanenbaum wrote a book called 'Operating Systems' which gave the source code for a Unix-like operating system called Minix.
Meanwhile at the University of Helsinki in Finland, a Computer Science student named Linus Torvalds was tinkering. He wanted a Unix-like operating system; Minix was good but was designed primarily as a teaching tool.
Back track for a moment to the early 1980's. At that time a famous programmer named Richard Stallman, who had created the emacs text editor, had grown tired of the restrictions of proprietary software and operating systems. Stallman felt that software should be shared openly in order to make it better and more efficient. He had created the GNU project back in 1983 to work towards this goal (by the way, the name GNU is a recursive acronym which actually stands for 'GNU is Not Unix'). Then in 1984 Stallman began writing GCC (the GNU C Compiler). Soon GNU had developed many tools, but still needed a kernel for the operating system; enter Linus Torvalds.
On August 25, 1991 this historic post was sent to the Minux news group by Linus:
| From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus
Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI> Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Hello everybody out there using minix - |
Linus did not believe at that time that his operating system would be anything bigger than a hobby project. Linux version 0.01 was released in September 1991 and posted on the internet. Interest in it grew, and many people began to pitch in and contribute to the project. Version 0.02 came out on October 5th, along with this message from Linus:
| From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI
(Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI> Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-) As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it. Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi (128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux (bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel source is provided, as no minix code has been used. Library sources are only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The system is able to compile "as-is" and has been known to work. Heh. Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the same place in /pub/gnu. |
Soon version 0.10 came out in December. Not long after, version numbers went directly to 0.12, then 0.95, 0.96, and so on. Eventually the code was on ftp sites worldwide, and growing day by day.
All this development brought attention to Linus and his Linux project. Finally, Andrew Tanenbaum, the professor who had developed Linux, made a public comment that Linux was "obsolete" and added this:
| " I still maintain the point that
designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful
you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)" (Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds) |
It was a blow, but with the backing of the Linux community behind him, Linus replied with this:
| Your job is being a professor
and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages
of minix. (Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum) |
Before long, more than a hundred people had joined the Linux community. This number grew to thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. Since Linux was now powered by many programs from the GNU project, it soon became licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which insured that the source code would be free for others to copy and change.
With the creation of commercial companies such as RedHat and major Linux distributions such as Debian and Slackware, Linux became even more established.
"I was using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) in 1969, but we did not call it that at the time. We called it 'software' ". (John MadDog Hall)
"In other Microsoft news, the company agreed to allow ISPs to let their customers know that there are other browsers besides Internet Explorer." (CNET)
"The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down ("lie"), and drill that lie home." (joelonsoftware.com)
Here are some local links (more to come):
How to configure printing
Here are some other links:
SATLUG - San Antonio, Texas Linux Users Group
Server Beach - self managed hosting
Rackspace - managed hosting
A nice Linux user's page
Slackware links:
The Ultimate SlackWare HOWTO thread, located in the Slackware discussion forums