Book Overview

1.1 Introduction to UNIX and Linux Linux is a true 32–bit operating system that runs on a variety of different platforms, including Intel, Sparc, Alpha, and Power–PC (on some of these platforms, such as Alpha, Linux is actually 64–bit). Linux was first developed back in the early 1990s, by a young Finnish then–university student named Linus Torvalds. Linus had a "state–of–the–art" 386 box at home and decided to write an alternative to the 286–based Minix system (a small UNIX–like implementation primarily used in operating systems classes), to take advantage of the extra instruction set available on the then–new chip, and began to write a small bare–bones kernel.