Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...
Yes, Please make this my home page!
What is Linux?
 |
LINUX |
 |
ENTER THE TECHIE-WORLD THROUGH LINUX
Who would have ever imagined that a pet project by a finnish student
would make the most arrogant and boastful executive of the biggest
software company in the history of computing loose their sleep! Yes ,we
are talking about LINUX-a project by Finnish student. LINUX a operating
system which is distributed for free is now running mission critical
space applications at NASA, research work at various universities and
was the platform used to bring magic to the silver screen in movies
like JURASSIC PARK and TITANIC . It is the most portable O.S. which
can run on computers ranging from X86 processors (Intel and clones) to
APPLE MACHINTOSHes and from IBM Mainframes to SGI's Super
computers . It has very low system requirements and would give such
performance on a 486 that a Pentium running windows would find
difficulty to match. It does not run on processors before 386 as 80286
and older processors weren't 32 bit processors and LINUX is written 32 bit
from scratch unlike windows which is derived from a 16 bit OS (ie.MS-DOS)
which was never actually written by Microsoft and is a derivative
of Q-Dos aquired from seattle computer products.
LINUX is pronounced as Lih-nucks.
LINUX first appeared on the scene when on 3rd of July 1991 a
finnish university student LINUS TORVALDS working on a project in
MINIX sent an e-mail to a newsgroup asking for help regarding POSIX
standard ( a standard supported by all UNIX O.S. and varients. ). It
grabbed the attention of some programmers which later developed into
it's developer community and so LINUX kernel 0.0.2 was released in
october 1991 by LINUS for the developer community to review and
develop, LINUS alongwith hackers around the world, is still working on
improving the kernel. It was in the year 1994 that company's like Caldera
and SUSE started selling their LINUX distribution (a package consisting
of the O.S. , source code, various application programs, manuals and
support via e-mail or other means ). LINUX is covered by GNU-GPL
(General public lisence ). According to this lisence one is allowed to use
the software for free , you can view it's source code ( The actual
programming code unlike Windows and other commercial OS where
even after paying you are given the OS only in binary format, you can
never see it's code.) even though the product will be a copyright of the
original programmer. You can modify or even sell the product without
giving anything to the programmer, but the source code should be given
along with it. This lisence was formulated by Richard Stallman when he
formed the Open Source Software Foundation GNU (Gnu is Not Unix).
LINUX did not become popular just because it can be obtained
for free ,no doubt it helped but it's not the main reason. LINUX has that
stability which even Windows-NT is still trying to achieve. It's uptime
(time between crashes) is counted in months unlike weeks for NT and
days for win9X. In LINUX user applications don't have access to
hardware, they are bound to only what the OS provides them with.
When a program crashes the linux kernel gives it a chance to recover
and if it can't the program stops and it does not crash the complete OS
as in Windows. Ask any Linux guru and he will proudly say "You can't
crash it even if you want to."
Till recently, installing linux used to be a problem but newer version
of Linux are much easy to install and have a complete graphical
installation, it may not be as easy as installing Windows but, with
Plug-n-Play now available and the large database of device drivers that
Linux has, installation can be a breeze if your hardware is supported.
This is one place where Linux lacks behind Windows that is hardware
support even though Plug-n-Play has been incorporated in Linux to
some extent. Drivers for devices in Linux are not readily available as all
parts of software related to Linux should be open source and
commercial vendors are not ready to do so. Though things are change
with companies like Nvidia making their driver source available for
Linux. The other problem people had with adapting linux was that they
thought Linux was all about command line and it lacked a GUI(graphical
user interface ) which is not true and Linux had good GUI's in the form
of Gnome, KDE and Window Maker to some extent.They are a lot more
customisable than windows and almost get all your workdone without
dropping to the command line. But most of the Linux users prefer
command line which is as powerful as UNIX command line. You can
also do your Office work using Star-Office in LINUX,an office tool like
MS-office in Windows. LINUX had advantages of UNIX, Windows and
Novell-Netware because of which it had occupied 25% of the server's
all over the world and has gained recognition as a server based OS
in it's short time.So start using it at your end.
Happy Linuxing.......
© 2000,VIVSWAN . ALL RIGHT'S RESERVED.
