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17 years of Linux

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  • 17 years
  • linux
  • torvalds
17Sep2008

On 17 September 1991 Linus Torvalds was announcing the first version of Linux 0.0.1.
The rest is history.


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).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

Also here's a small interesting fact from wikipedia


Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "freak," "free," and "x," an allusion to Unix. During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about a half year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux," but initially dismissed it as too egotistical[6].


In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, Torvald's coworker at the HUT who was responsible for the servers at the time, did not feel Freax was a good name. Consequently, he dubbed the project "Linux" without consulting Torvalds[6]. Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux": "After many arguments, he finally admitted that Linux was simply the better name. In the source code of version 0.01 of Linux, the name 'Freax' was still used in the makefile. Only later was the name Linux used. Thus the name actually not planned at all became generally accepted world-wide.

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Comments

#1 Linux

Submitted by Jim Winston (not verified) on Wed, 17/09/2008 - 23:25.

Wow, I cant believe Linux has been around that long. I wish I would have switched 17 years ago. I kjust switched from Vista 3 weeks ago and LOVE it!

Jiff
www.Fireme.To/udi

  • reply

#2 The older brother

Submitted by tom (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 01:58.

GNU is 25 years old...

  • reply

#3 You're off by a bit. Several

Submitted by Matt (not verified) on Wed, 17/09/2008 - 23:41.

You're off by a bit. Several other sites mark that posting as being from August 25, 1991.

Links:

http://www.linux.org/people/linus_post.html

Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

  • reply

#4 Yea the funny thing is that

Submitted by CoolGoose on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 00:03.

Yea the funny thing is that i've heard about this today on the radio and on the newspapers here in Romania. Maybe we're using another calendar.

Le
I think that Sept 17 is the actual ftp upload of 0.0.1

  • reply

#5 Linux

Submitted by Matthew Hughes (not verified) on Wed, 17/09/2008 - 23:43.

I much prefer PC BSD. It's a happy medium between UNIX greatness and OS X/Windoze simplicity.

  • reply

#6 It could have been worse than Freax

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 17/09/2008 - 23:53.

It could have been Phreax... but thankfully and rightly it was aptly named after it's creator. Linux has such a great ring to it.

I take my red-hat off to you Mr. Torvalds.

Oh, and I just began experimenting with various forms of Linux a few months ago, and it has been a great experience thus far, and I'm coming from Windows > OS X > Linux (Ubuntu)

sodu apt-get install

Cheers

  • reply

#7 He is genuis and deserves an award

Submitted by love linux (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 01:07.

I'm amazed how unrecognized he is as a person.

  • reply

#8 Say What?

Submitted by Z (not verified) on Sat, 20/09/2008 - 12:41.

He was on Time magazines 60 years of heroes list.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/torvalds.html

  • reply

#9 Colors

Submitted by Greg Donald (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 03:47.

Your choice of light grey on white sucks.

  • reply

#10 It's just a theme. This is

Submitted by CoolGoose on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 09:30.

It's just a theme. This is the lightest that i could find for drupal that has decent typography. I'll change the gray with black when I'm back from work ;).

  • reply

#11 Linux Only Got Better Recently

Submitted by Keith (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 08:49.

When the first version is out, it was not meant to replace any other operating systems. It was only the recent years that some developers decided to make use of its underlying kernel source code to break the barrier. As such, Linux began to arouse interest only during the recent years.

  • reply

#12 'Recent' is subject to point of view

Submitted by Vizeroth (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 19:35.

The first time I used Linux was in 1996 when I started college. At that time, many of my friends were using a window system on Linux that emulated the look of Windows 95. This was when Linux was only 5 years old.

Even at that time Linux rivaled most of the opposition as a workstation (the school used it for their computer labs while Sun/Solaris ran in the server environment). The desktop environment was really in its formative years on all platforms, and there were many ways in which a Linux environment was better than the Windows 9x environment. Of course, for most people getting an operating system was (and still is) completely a part of buying the computer itself, so the idea of downloading (or getting it some other way) an operating system was foreign to most computer users. Still, as college students, even with dial-up as our primary means of internet connectivity outside the computer labs, the idea of being able to legally download an operating system and all of the software we needed for day-to-day use was completely embraced.

Besides, most of us at that time were still booting into DOS to run games, so the dual-boot choice was not the least bit foreign, or even an obstacle, to any of us.

  • reply

#13 The system that you were

Submitted by ecadre (not verified) on Sat, 27/09/2008 - 01:22.

The system that you were using wasn't just 5 years old, it was a packaged distribution of the GNU operating system with Linux as the relatively small kernel part.

GNU started in 1983.

http://www.gnu.org

  • reply

#14 I guess only next year we can

Submitted by CTI97 (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 22:43.

I guess only next year we can call it "mature" coz it will have the right to drink (in europa and romania) ! :)

  • reply

#15 Yeah, I agree with that. Next

Submitted by Carlos (not verified) on Thu, 18/09/2008 - 23:21.

Yeah, I agree with that.
Next year, It'll become a man. 18 is old enough to drink in Mexico too, and to kill in the US.

  • reply

#16 You can test it in qemu/bochs/kvm

Submitted by mariuz (not verified) on Sun, 21/09/2008 - 14:10.

here is the link
http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Dusting_Off_the_0.01_Kernel

  • reply

#17 linux 0.0.1 update

Submitted by mariuz (not verified) on Sun, 21/09/2008 - 18:28.

here is more info about dusting off the linux 0.0.1

http://draconux.free.fr/os_dev/linux0.01.html

also here are my results on compiling the kernel 0.0.1 on ubuntu hardy

http://mapopa.blogspot.com/2008/09/linux-0.html

  • reply

#18 Linux wasn't useful 17 years ago

Submitted by Chiron613 (not verified) on Sun, 04/01/2009 - 01:37.

For most of us, had we tried Linux when it first came out, we'd have wondered why anyone would ever bother. It was almost completely useless for anything other than learning some things about computer science.

As others have pointed out, GNU has made Linux what it is today. Without GNU, Linux would just sit there with a blinking cursor. Richard Stallman and friends wrote the many utilities that actually do things in Linux. Stallman was (and still is) writing a kernel himself, called the HURD.

Stallman's contributions to the creation of "Linux" have been greatlty underappreciated. What we call "Linux" is actually both the Linux kernel and the set of GNU software that makes it do things (plus a whole lot of other software besides). While I don't agree that we should call it "GNU/Linux" as Stallman insists, I do feel his contributions should be acknowledged. Anyway, since Linux is the kernel, I'd be inclined to call it "Linux/GNU", if I were going to attach the GNU name to it.

  • reply

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