Linus Torvalds, a very cool guy and sometime Screen Saver guest, wrote the Linux
operating system while he was a college
student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Instead of making it proprietary and
trying to sell it, Torvalds gave it away,
so anyone who wanted to develop for it could do so. As a result, thousands of people all
over the world have worked on
Linux, and it has become a very sophisticated, complex, and powerful operating system. It
is available as a free download or,
for a nominal fee, on CD-ROM.
But don't run out and download Linux just because it's free. It's not a consumer operating
system, and it requires a very high
level of skill to install and run. It's a flavor of the Unix operating system-- on which
most of the Internet runs-- and is mainly
used by programmers as a development tool.
Think of an operating system like the levels of the Titanic. At the bottom there are the
steamroom workers who keep the ship
moving; they're the BIOS. The next level up, you have the employees and attendants; the
hardware. Above that, you have
all the decks with passengers; the applications. Like Windows, Linux has applications, but
it's as different from Windows as a
Mac is from a PC. Windows documents cannot necessarily be read by Linux, and Windows
programs cannot run on Linux. Most
distributions of Linux don't have a graphical user interface, meaning no friendly buttons,
and no pick-and-choose menus.
Knowing Unix is a very valuable skill, so if you want to learn, using Linux is the way to
go. You'll need to get one of the many
different versions of Linux, which are called distributions. Leo recommends the Red Hat
Distribution, from Red Hat Software. It
seems to be Linus Torvalds' favorite as well. The Red Hat Distribution is one of the
easiest to install, and has the most
complete set of tools.