Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License (Linux is written and distributed under the GNU General Public License which means that its source code is freely-distributed and available to the general public. ) and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
Reasons to use:
- Open source ( Free and Source code is available.) and the source code can be modified to fit your needs. And there are no licensing fees for using Linux.
- Linux is platform independent uns on various machine architectures and platforms than any other computer operating system
- Works well on machines that are not "modern". It has a capacity to run on any kind of computers, even aging x486-based computers with limited amounts of RAM.
- Linux is a true multi-tasking operating system similar to UNIX.
- Linux is stable and even if a program crashes, it won't bring the OS down. That means if a program crashes you can kill it and continue working with confidence. Unless you update the kernel, you'll never need to reboot.
- A big benefit of using Linux is that it is free from viruses that we find in other operating systems.
- The main reason that the big commercial vendors using linux for their virtualization technology is its performance.
