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82-602: The SCC is currently utilized for research purposes. It can run the Linux operating system on the chip but it cannot run Windows . Some applications of the SCC include web servers , data informatics , bioinformatics , and financial analytics . The cores are spread across the chip but capable of direct communication. The chip comprises 48 P54C Pentium cores connected with a 4×6 2D-mesh. This mesh consists of 24 tiles arranged in four rows and six columns. Each tile contains two cores and

164-472: A high-level language implementation of Unix made its porting to different computer platforms easier. Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, AT&T licensed the operating system's source code as a trade secret to anyone who asked. As a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of its regional operating companies , and

246-424: A minimalist functionality, while more elaborate window managers such as FVWM , Enlightenment , or Window Maker provide more features such as a built-in taskbar and themes , but are still lightweight when compared to desktop environments. Desktop environments include window managers as part of their standard installations, such as Mutter (GNOME), KWin (KDE), or Xfwm (xfce), although users may choose to use

328-516: A solution stack such as LAMP . The source code of Linux may be used, modified, and distributed commercially or non-commercially by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). The license means creating novel distributions is permitted by anyone and is easier than it would be for an operating system such as MacOS or Microsoft Windows . The Linux kernel, for example,

410-507: A 16 KB (8 per core) message passing buffer (MPB) shared by the two cores, essentially functioning as a router. This router enables each core to communicate directly with others, eliminating the need to send information back to the main memory for rerouting to other cores. The SCC contains 1.3 billion 45 nm transistors capable of amplifying signals or acting as a switch, using 25 to 125 watts of power depending on processing demand. Each chip includes four DDR3 memory controllers connected to

492-455: A GNU layer on top (i.e. Linux with GNU), because the kernel can operate a machine without GNU, is a matter of ongoing debate. The FSF maintains that an operating system built using the Linux kernel and GNU tools and utilities should be considered a variant of GNU , and promotes the term GNU/Linux for such systems (leading to the GNU/Linux naming controversy ). This view is not exclusive to

574-470: A competing OS, agrees that "Linux wasn't designed, it evolved", but considers this to be a limitation, proposing that some features, especially those related to security, cannot be evolved into, "this is not a biological system at the end of the day, it's a software system." A Linux-based system is a modular Unix-like operating system, deriving much of its basic design from principles established in Unix during

656-974: A different window manager if preferred. Wayland is a display server protocol intended as a replacement for the X11 protocol; as of 2022 , it has received relatively wide adoption. Unlike X11, Wayland does not need an external window manager and compositing manager. Therefore, a Wayland compositor takes the role of the display server, window manager, and compositing manager. Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, while GNOME's Mutter and KDE's KWin are being ported to Wayland as standalone display servers. Enlightenment has already been successfully ported since version 19. Additionally, many window managers have been made for Wayland, such as Sway or Hyprland, as well as other graphical utilities such as Waybar or Rofi. Linux currently has two modern kernel-userspace APIs for handling video input devices: V4L2 API for video streams and radio, and DVB API for digital TV reception. Due to

738-427: A network of cloud computers. The SCC comes with RCCE, a simple message-passing interface provided by Intel supporting basic message-buffering operations. The SCC operates in two modes: processor mode and mesh mode. In processor mode, cores are active, executing code from the system memory, and performing programmed I/O ( inputs and outputs ) through the system connected to the system board FPGA . Software running on

820-712: A non-GNU kernel . (See below.) The original kernel of GNU Project is the GNU Hurd (together with the GNU Mach microkernel), which was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). With the April 30, 2015 release of the Debian GNU/Hurd 2015 distro, GNU now provides all required components to assemble an operating system that users can install and use on a computer. However,

902-404: A place in server installations such as the popular LAMP application stack. The use of Linux distributions in home and enterprise desktops has been growing. Linux distributions have also become popular in the netbook market, with many devices shipping with customized Linux distributions installed, and Google releasing their own ChromeOS designed for netbooks. Linux's greatest success in

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984-502: A popular CLI shell. The graphical user interface (or GUI) used by most Linux systems is built on top of an implementation of the X Window System . More recently, the Linux community has sought to advance to Wayland as the new display server protocol, in place of X11. Many other open-source software projects contribute to Linux systems. Installed components of a Linux system include the following: The user interface , also known as

1066-630: A program called UniPress, over a controversy around software code use in the GNU Emacs program. For most of the 80s, each GNU package had its own license: the Emacs General Public License, the GCC General Public License, etc. In 1989, FSF published a single license they could use for all their software, and which could be used by non-GNU projects: the GNU General Public License (GPL). This license

1148-481: A significant business around Linux distributions. The free software licenses , on which the various software packages of a distribution built on the Linux kernel are based, explicitly accommodate and encourage commercialization; the relationship between a Linux distribution as a whole and individual vendors may be seen as symbiotic . One common business model of commercial suppliers is charging for support, especially for business users. A number of companies also offer

1230-493: A specialized business version of their distribution, which adds proprietary support packages and tools to administer higher numbers of installations or to simplify administrative tasks. Another business model is to give away the software to sell hardware. This used to be the norm in the computer industry, with operating systems such as CP/M , Apple DOS , and versions of the classic Mac OS before 7.6 freely copyable (but not modifiable). As computer hardware standardized throughout

1312-972: A system's software from one central location. A distribution is largely driven by its developer and user communities. Some vendors develop and fund their distributions on a volunteer basis, Debian being a well-known example. Others maintain a community version of their commercial distributions, as Red Hat does with Fedora , and SUSE does with openSUSE . In many cities and regions, local associations known as Linux User Groups (LUGs) seek to promote their preferred distribution and by extension free software. They hold meetings and provide free demonstrations, training, technical support, and operating system installation to new users. Many Internet communities also provide support to Linux users and developers. Most distributions and free software / open-source projects have IRC chatrooms or newsgroups . Online forums are another means of support, with notable examples being Unix & Linux Stack Exchange , LinuxQuestions.org and

1394-409: A total of 467 GNU packages (including decommissioned, 394 excluding) hosted on the official GNU development site. In its original meaning , and one still common in hardware engineering, the operating system is a basic set of functions to control the hardware and manage things like task scheduling and system calls . In modern terminology used by software developers, the collection of these functions

1476-402: A user may interact with the application; however, certain extensions of the X Window System are not capable of working over the network. Several X display servers exist, with the reference implementation, X.Org Server , being the most popular. Server distributions might provide a command-line interface for developers and administrators, but provide a custom interface for end-users, designed for

1558-453: A vast body of work and may include both kernel modules and user applications and libraries. Linux vendors and communities combine and distribute the kernel, GNU components, and non-GNU components, with additional package management software in the form of Linux distributions. Many developers of open-source software agree that the Linux kernel was not designed but rather evolved through natural selection . Torvalds considers that although

1640-458: Is a recursive acronym for " GNU 's Not Unix!", chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like , but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code. Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu . Development of the GNU operating system was initiated by Richard Stallman while he worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . It

1722-453: Is an accepted version of this page Linux ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / , LIN -uuks ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel , an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds . Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries — many of which are provided by

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1804-469: Is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages as of June 2024 ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux . Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project 's own General Public License ( GPL ). GNU is also the project within which

1886-569: Is licensed under the GPLv2, with an exception for system calls that allows code that calls the kernel via system calls not to be licensed under the GPL. Because of the dominance of Linux-based Android on smartphones , Linux, including Android, has the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems as of May 2022 . Linux is, as of March 2024 , used by around 4 percent of desktop computers . The Chromebook , which runs

1968-549: Is now used by most of GNU software, as well as a large number of free software programs that are not part of the GNU Project; it also historically has been the most commonly used free software license (though recently challenged by the MIT license ). It gives all recipients of a program the right to run, copy, modify and distribute it, while forbidding them from imposing further restrictions on any copies they distribute. This idea

2050-860: Is often referred to as copyleft . In 1991, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), then known as the Library General Public License, was written for the GNU C Library to allow it to be linked with proprietary software. 1991 also saw the release of version 2 of the GNU GPL. The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation, followed in 2000. The GPL and LGPL were revised to version 3 in 2007, adding clauses to protect users against hardware restrictions that prevent users from running modified software on their own devices. Besides GNU's packages,

2132-403: Is that the Linux kernel and other components are free and open-source software. Linux is not the only such operating system, although it is by far the most widely used. Some free and open-source software licenses are based on the principle of copyleft , a kind of reciprocity: any work derived from a copyleft piece of software must also be copyleft itself. The most common free software license,

2214-534: Is the Bourne-Again Shell (bash), originally developed for the GNU Project, other shells such as Zsh are also used. Most low-level Linux components, including various parts of the userland , use the CLI exclusively. The CLI is particularly suited for automation of repetitive or delayed tasks and provides very simple inter-process communication . On desktop systems, the most popular user interfaces are

2296-475: Is typically built into the firmware and is highly tailored to the system. This includes routers , automation controls, smart home devices , video game consoles , televisions (Samsung and LG smart TVs ), automobiles (Tesla, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Toyota), and spacecraft ( Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon crew capsule, and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter). The Unix operating system

2378-415: Is used on a wide variety of devices including PCs, workstations , mainframes and embedded systems . Linux is the predominant operating system for servers and is also used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers . When combined with Android , which is Linux-based and designed for smartphones , they have the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems . The Linux kernel

2460-432: Is usually referred to as a kernel , while an 'operating system' is expected to have a more extensive set of programs. The GNU project maintains two kernels itself, allowing the creation of pure GNU operating systems, but the GNU toolchain is also used with non-GNU kernels. Due to the two different definitions of the term 'operating system', there is an ongoing debate concerning the naming of distributions of GNU packages with

2542-452: The Free Software Foundation (FSF). In the late 1980s and 1990s, the FSF hired software developers to write the software needed for GNU. As GNU gained prominence, interested businesses began contributing to development or selling GNU software and technical support. The most prominent and successful of these was Cygnus Solutions , now part of Red Hat . The system's basic components include

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2624-421: The Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) in 1989. By the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system (such as libraries, compilers , text editors , a command-line shell , and a windowing system ) were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers , daemons , and the kernel , called GNU Hurd , were stalled and incomplete. Minix

2706-853: The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils), but also the GNU Debugger (GDB), GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), and the GNU Bash shell. GNU developers have contributed to Linux ports of GNU applications and utilities, which are now also widely used on other operating systems such as BSD variants, Solaris and macOS . Many GNU programs have been ported to other operating systems, including proprietary platforms such as Microsoft Windows and macOS. GNU programs have been shown to be more reliable than their proprietary Unix counterparts. As of June 2024 , there are

2788-601: The GNU Project — to create a complete operating system. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name " GNU/Linux " to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy . Thousands of distributions exist, many based directly or indirectly on other distributions; popular Linux distributions include Debian , Fedora Linux , Arch Linux , and Ubuntu , while commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise . Other than

2870-638: The GNU toolchain , which includes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the GNU Build System . Amongst others, GCC provides compilers for Ada , C , C++ , Go and Fortran . Many programming languages have a cross-platform reference implementation that supports Linux, for example PHP , Perl , Ruby , Python , Java , Go , Rust and Haskell . First released in 2003, the LLVM project provides an alternative cross-platform open-source compiler for many languages. Proprietary compilers for Linux include

2952-473: The GUI shells , packaged together with extensive Desktop environments , such as KDE Plasma , GNOME , MATE , Cinnamon , LXDE , Pantheon , and Xfce , though a variety of additional user interfaces exist. Most popular user interfaces are based on the X Window System, often simply called "X". It provides network transparency and permits a graphical application running on one system to be displayed on another where

3034-717: The Intel C++ Compiler , Sun Studio , and IBM XL C/C++ Compiler . BASIC is available in procedural form from QB64 , PureBasic , Yabasic , GLBasic , Basic4GL , XBasic , wxBasic , SdlBasic , and Basic-256 , as well as object oriented through Gambas , FreeBASIC , B4X, Basic for Qt , Phoenix Object Basic, NS Basic , ProvideX, Chipmunk Basic , RapidQ and Xojo . Pascal is implemented through GNU Pascal , Free Pascal , and Virtual Pascal , as well as graphically via Lazarus , PascalABC.NET , or Delphi using FireMonkey (previously through Borland Kylix ). GNU GNU ( / ɡ n uː / )

3116-409: The free software concept originated. Richard Stallman , the founder of the project, views GNU as a "technical means to a social end". Relatedly, Lawrence Lessig states in his introduction to the second edition of Stallman's book Free Software, Free Society that in it Stallman has written about "the social aspects of software and how Free Software can create community and social justice". GNU

3198-476: The shell , is either a command-line interface (CLI), a graphical user interface (GUI), or controls attached to the associated hardware, which is common for embedded systems. For desktop systems, the default user interface is usually graphical, although the CLI is commonly available through terminal emulator windows or on a separate virtual console . CLI shells are text-based user interfaces, which use text for both input and output. The dominant shell used in Linux

3280-399: The 1970s and 1980s. Such a system uses a monolithic kernel , the Linux kernel, which handles process control, networking, access to the peripherals , and file systems . Device drivers are either integrated directly with the kernel or added as modules that are loaded while the system is running. The GNU userland is a key part of most systems based on the Linux kernel, with Android being

3362-454: The 1980s, it became more difficult for hardware manufacturers to profit from this tactic, as the OS would run on any manufacturer's computer that shared the same architecture. Most programming languages support Linux either directly or through third-party community based ports . The original development tools used for building both Linux applications and operating system programs are found within

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3444-421: The 2D mesh, capable of addressing 64 GB of random-access memory . The DDR3 memory facilitates communication among tiles, contributing to the chip's functionality. These controllers, along with the transistors, manage the activation and deactivation of specific tiles to conserve power when not in use. Proper coding integration results in a functional processor with high speed, power, and energy efficiency, resembling

3526-529: The FSF. Notably, Debian , one of the biggest and oldest Linux distributions, refers to itself as Debian GNU/Linux . The GNU Project recommends that contributors assign the copyright for GNU packages to the Free Software Foundation, though the Free Software Foundation considers it acceptable to release small changes to an existing project to the public domain . However, this is not required; package maintainers may retain copyright to

3608-674: The GNU General Public License (GPL), is a form of copyleft and is used for the Linux kernel and many of the components from the GNU Project. Linux-based distributions are intended by developers for interoperability with other operating systems and established computing standards. Linux systems adhere to POSIX, SUS , LSB , ISO , and ANSI standards where possible, although to date only one Linux distribution has been POSIX.1 certified, Linux-FT. Free software projects, although developed through collaboration , are often produced independently of each other. The fact that

3690-468: The GNU Project's licenses can and are used by many unrelated projects, such as the Linux kernel , often used with GNU software. A majority of free software such as the X Window System, is licensed under permissive free software licenses . The logo for GNU is a gnu head. Originally drawn by Etienne Suvasa, a bolder and simpler version designed by Aurelio Heckert is now preferred. It appears in GNU software and in printed and electronic documentation for

3772-569: The GNU packages they maintain, though since only the copyright holder may enforce the license used (such as the GNU GPL), the copyright holder in this case enforces it rather than the Free Software Foundation. For the development of needed software, Stallman wrote a license called the GNU General Public License (first called Emacs General Public License), with the goal to guarantee users freedom to share and change free software. Stallman wrote this license after his experience with James Gosling and

3854-508: The Hurd kernel is not yet considered production-ready but rather a base for further development and non-critical application usage. In 2012, a fork of the Linux kernel became officially part of the GNU Project in the form of Linux-libre , a variant of Linux with all proprietary components removed. The GNU Project has endorsed Linux-libre distributions, such as Trisquel , Parabola GNU/Linux-libre , PureOS and GNU Guix System . Because of

3936-464: The Linux kernel, key components that make up a distribution may include a display server (windowing system) , a package manager , a bootloader and the Bash shell . Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open-source software collaboration. While originally developed for x86 based personal computers , it has since been ported to more platforms than any other operating system, and

4018-650: The Linux kernel-based ChromeOS , dominates the US K–12 education market and represents nearly 20 percent of sub-$ 300 notebook sales in the US. Linux is the leading operating system on servers (over 96.4% of the top one million web servers' operating systems are Linux), leads other big iron systems such as mainframe computers , and is used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers (as of November 2017 , having gradually displaced all competitors). Linux also runs on embedded systems , i.e., devices whose operating system

4100-613: The Linux kernel. On July 3, 1991, to implement Unix system calls , Linus Torvalds attempted unsuccessfully to obtain a digital copy of the POSIX standards documentation with a request to the comp.os.minix newsgroup . After not finding the POSIX documentation, Torvalds initially resorted to determining system calls from SunOS documentation owned by the university for use in operating its Sun Microsystems server. He also learned some system calls from Tanenbaum's Minix text. Torvalds began

4182-511: The SCC to advance the technology. The goal is to make the SCC scalable to 100+ cores, potentially achieved by enabling communication between individual chips. Intel aims to enhance parallel programming productivity and power management, leveraging the chip's architecture and numerous cores. Further experimentation is planned on this architecture and similar chip architectures to develop many-core scalable processors maximizing processing power while maintaining energy efficiency. Linux This

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4264-489: The SCC's embedded management console handles tasks such as loading memory and configuring the processor for bootstrapping (sustaining after the initial load). In mesh mode, cores are turned off, leaving only the routers, transistors, and RAM controllers active. These components send and receive large packets of data without a memory map . Intel intends to share this technology with other companies, including HP , Yahoo , and Microsoft , to foster collaborative research on

4346-471: The beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers." Bryan Cantrill , an engineer of

4428-447: The complexity and diversity of different devices, and due to the large number of formats and standards handled by those APIs, this infrastructure needs to evolve to better fit other devices. Also, a good userspace device library is the key to the success of having userspace applications to be able to work with all formats supported by those devices. The primary difference between Linux and many other popular contemporary operating systems

4510-431: The computer architecture for which ITS was written, led to a decision that a portable system was necessary. It was thus decided that the development would be started using C and Lisp as system programming languages, and that GNU would be compatible with Unix. At the time, Unix was already a popular proprietary operating system. The design of Unix was modular, so it could be reimplemented piece by piece. Much of

4592-498: The consumer market is perhaps the mobile device market, with Android being the dominant operating system on smartphones and very popular on tablets and, more recently, on wearables . Linux gaming is also on the rise with Valve showing its support for Linux and rolling out SteamOS , its own gaming-oriented Linux distribution, which was later implemented in their Steam Deck platform. Linux distributions have also gained popularity with various local and national governments, such as

4674-467: The design of Unix served as a scaffolding, "Linux grew with a lot of mutations – and because the mutations were less than random, they were faster and more directed than alpha-particles in DNA ." Eric S. Raymond considers Linux's revolutionary aspects to be social, not technical: before Linux, complex software was designed carefully by small groups, but "Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly

4756-508: The development of 386BSD , from which NetBSD , OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. Linus Torvalds has stated on separate occasions that if the GNU kernel or 386BSD had been available at the time (1991), he probably would not have created Linux. While attending the University of Helsinki in the fall of 1990, Torvalds enrolled in a Unix course. The course used a MicroVAX minicomputer running Ultrix , and one of

4838-477: The development of the Linux kernel on Minix and applications written for Minix were also used on Linux. Later, Linux matured and further Linux kernel development took place on Linux systems. GNU applications also replaced all Minix components, because it was advantageous to use the freely available code from the GNU Project with the fledgling operating system; code licensed under the GNU GPL can be reused in other computer programs as long as they also are released under

4920-476: The development of the components of the system and free software. An analysis of the Linux kernel in 2017 showed that well over 85% of the code was developed by programmers who are being paid for their work, leaving about 8.2% to unpaid developers and 4.1% unclassified. Some of the major corporations that provide contributions include Intel , Samsung , Google , AMD , Oracle , and Facebook . Several corporations, notably Red Hat, Canonical , and SUSE have built

5002-416: The development status of Hurd, GNU is usually paired with other kernels such as Linux or FreeBSD . Whether the combination of GNU libraries with external kernels is a GNU operating system with a kernel (e.g. GNU with Linux), because the GNU collection renders the kernel into a usable operating system as understood in modern software development, or whether the kernel is an operating system unto itself with

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5084-433: The federal government of Brazil . Linus Torvalds is the lead maintainer for the Linux kernel and guides its development, while Greg Kroah-Hartman is the lead maintainer for the stable branch. Zoë Kooyman is the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, which in turn supports the GNU components. Finally, individuals and corporations develop third-party non-GNU components. These third-party components comprise

5166-471: The first version of the Linux kernel on the Internet . Like GNU and 386BSD, Linux did not have any Unix code and therefore avoided any current legal issues . Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland and a desktop environment such as GNOME , KDE Plasma or Xfce . Distributions intended for servers may not have a graphical user interface at all or include

5248-516: The mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM , followed by Hewlett-Packard , started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft 's monopoly in the desktop operating system market. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing, from embedded systems to virtually all supercomputers , and have secured

5330-657: The needed software had to be written from scratch, but existing compatible third-party free software components were also used such as the TeX typesetting system, the X Window System , and the Mach microkernel that forms the basis of the GNU Mach core of GNU Hurd (the official kernel of GNU). With the exception of the aforementioned third-party components, most of GNU has been written by volunteers; some in their spare time, some paid by companies, educational institutions, and other non-profit organizations. In October 1985, Stallman set up

5412-441: The notable exception. The GNU C library , an implementation of the C standard library , works as a wrapper for the system calls of the Linux kernel necessary to the kernel-userspace interface, the toolchain is a broad collection of programming tools vital to Linux development (including the compilers used to build the Linux kernel itself), and the coreutils implement many basic Unix tools . The GNU Project also develops Bash ,

5494-501: The operating system to their specific needs. Distributions are maintained by individuals, loose-knit teams, volunteer organizations, and commercial entities. A distribution is responsible for the default configuration of the installed Linux kernel, general system security, and more generally integration of the different software packages into a coherent whole. Distributions typically use a package manager such as apt , yum , zypper , pacman or portage to install, remove, and update all of

5576-455: The required texts was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum . This textbook included a copy of Tanenbaum's Minix operating system. It was with this course that Torvalds first became exposed to Unix. In 1991, he became curious about operating systems. Frustrated by the licensing of Minix, which at the time limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his operating system kernel, which eventually became

5658-412: The same or a compatible license. Torvalds initiated a switch from his original license, which prohibited commercial redistribution, to the GNU GPL. Developers worked to integrate GNU components with the Linux kernel, creating a fully functional and free operating system. Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention " Freax ", a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During

5740-441: The software licenses explicitly permit redistribution, however, provides a basis for larger-scale projects that collect the software produced by stand-alone projects and make it available all at once in the form of a Linux distribution. Many Linux distributions manage a remote collection of system software and application software packages available for download and installation through a network connection. This allows users to adapt

5822-627: The source code of the software they use, share software with other people, modify the behavior of software, and publish their modified versions of the software. This philosophy was published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985. Richard Stallman's experience with the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system written in assembly language that became obsolete due to discontinuation of PDP-10 ,

5904-586: The start of his work on the system, some of the project's makefiles included the name "Freax" for about half a year. Initially, Torvalds considered the name "Linux" but dismissed it as too egotistical. To facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server ( ftp.funet.fi ) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, Torvalds' coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who

5986-471: The use case of the system. This custom interface is accessed through a client that resides on another system, not necessarily Linux-based. Several types of window managers exist for X11, including tiling , dynamic , stacking , and compositing . Window managers provide means to control the placement and appearance of individual application windows, and interact with the X Window System. Simpler X window managers such as dwm , ratpoison , or i3wm provide

6068-559: The various distribution-specific support and community forums, such as ones for Ubuntu , Fedora, Arch Linux , Gentoo , etc. Linux distributions host mailing lists ; commonly there will be a specific topic such as usage or development for a given list. There are several technology websites with a Linux focus. Print magazines on Linux often bundle cover disks that carry software or even complete Linux distributions. Although Linux distributions are generally available without charge, several large corporations sell, support, and contribute to

6150-429: The word "Linux" should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code. However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ ( LEEN -uuks ) with a short but close front unrounded vowel , instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post. The adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in

6232-515: Was called the GNU Project, and was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups by Stallman. Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at the Lab so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU components as free software. The goal was to bring a completely free software operating system into existence. Stallman wanted computer users to be free to study

6314-508: Was conceived and implemented in 1969, at AT&T 's Bell Labs , in the United States by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna . First released in 1971, Unix was written entirely in assembly language , as was common practice at the time. In 1973, in a key pioneering approach, it was rewritten in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie (except for some hardware and I/O routines). The availability of

6396-446: Was created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum , a computer science professor, and released in 1987 as a minimal Unix-like operating system targeted at students and others who wanted to learn operating system principles. Although the complete source code of Minix was freely available, the licensing terms prevented it from being free software until the licensing changed in April 2000. Although not released until 1992, due to legal complications ,

6478-510: Was designed by Linus Torvalds , following the lack of a working kernel for GNU , a Unix -compatible operating system made entirely of free software that had been undergoing development since 1983 by Richard Stallman . While a separate working Unix-compatible system called Minix was later released, its license was not entirely free at the time. The first entirely free Unix for personal computers, 386BSD , did not appear until 1992, by which time Torvalds had already built and publicly released

6560-459: Was later originally developed, it represented the first successful commercial attempt at distributing a primarily single-user microcomputer that ran a Unix operating system. With Unix increasingly "locked in" as a proprietary product, the GNU Project , started in 1983 by Richard Stallman , had the goal of creating a "complete Unix-compatible software system" composed entirely of free software . Work began in 1984. Later, in 1985, Stallman started

6642-513: Was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name, so he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds. Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds, the word "Linux" should be pronounced ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / LIN -uuks ) with a short 'i' as in 'print' and 'u' as in 'put'. To further demonstrate how

6724-518: Was released from its obligation not to enter the computer business; freed of that obligation, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product, where users were not legally allowed to modify it. Onyx Systems began selling early microcomputer-based Unix workstations in 1980. Later, Sun Microsystems , founded as a spin-off of a student project at Stanford University , also began selling Unix-based desktop workstations in 1982. While Sun workstations did not use commodity PC hardware, for which Linux

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