Published on: May 3, 2009 by Faheem P.
Scenario:
As a Linux administration company we always need employees who have sound knowledge in Linux. The blog is trying to provide an introduction to our Linux training program.
Creating Sages from newbies?
Its always initiative and the craving to perform that we try to inculcate among our members. The ability to lead the race to success is inbred in the veins of our students and trainers that makes them achieve their long term goals. Even before they set foot into the corporate world, we arm them with the ancillaries to sieze monopoly in their respective field. The only thing that we ask from them is response and not reply.The new recruits will be appraised for their clarity of the subject through this training and manicured so that they best fit the industry’s needs. The schedule for the training program is charted as three different modules and each modules into chapters!
Chapter 1 : A BRIEF HISTORY OF LINUX!
Bill Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corp once stated that: “Linux is 1960’s technology with a new development model”. What does he mean by this? Yes it was true! In olden days Linux offered the black screen for its users to work with and the GUI was a separate package.
The features of Unix in 1960’s are :-
A Brief History of Linux :-
1969 – Ken Thompson created Unix written in Assembler
1970 – Brian Kernighan gives the name as Unics, as a contrast to MULTICS, later changed to Unix.
1973 – Dennis Ritchie rewrites Unix in C to make the OS portable
Bell Labs (a subsidiary of AT&T) provided source of Unix to Universities which helped Unix to reach a high level of maturity
There are two flavors of Unix – BSD Unix and System V
Linux tries to combine the best from both worlds and is a modern Unix-like system and is portable
1984 – Richard Stallman start GNU project with the purpose of developing Free Unix. Rewritten gcc, emacs (his first big project) and bash
Development of Linux:-
MINIX, a Unix-like system intended for academic use, was released by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in 1987. While source code for the system was available, modification and redistribution were restricted 🙁
In 1991, a Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds began to work on a non-commercial replacement for MINIX while he was attending the University of Helsinki. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
After a few months of development, on 25 August 1991, he announced this system in a Usenet posting to the newsgroup “comp.os.minix.”:
This was his posting!
==========================================
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 :-(.
– Linus Torvalds
=========================================
As it is apparent from the posting, Linus himself didn’t believe that his creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux version 0.01 was released by mid September 1991, and was put on the net. Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. 0.02 came on October 5th, along with this famous declaration 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 HelsinkiDo 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.===============================================
So when this kernel compiled and combined with GNU applications, a complete GNU/Linux, rather a Unix like OS is born
Linux – Linus’ Unix
Mascot – Tux – Larry Ewing, the creator of Tux:-
Tux is the official mascot of the Linux Kernel . It originally created as an entry to a Linux logo competition.
1997 – ESR, Tim O’Reilly and VA’s Larry Augustin and a few others met and discussed ways to win mind share, and not just market share which they were lacking because of the word “free” in free software which business assumed they can’t support since they have to distribute the s/w they develop free of cost. And there a new word “Open source” was used.
Bruce Perens, head of Debian project actually derived Open source license from Debian Social Contract.
Category : General, Howtos, Linux, Training
Faheem enjoys learning new technologies and loves to implement cutting edge solutions. He is one of the most active member in various technical forums and is a familiar face in various brain storming sessions. He takes great pride in being an explorer and the best thing you can be sure about in his room is the backpack!!
Add new commentSIGN IN