Properties of Linux

Linux Pros:

A lot of the advantages of Linux are a consequence of Linux' origins, deeply rooted in UNIX, except for the first advantage, of course:

• Linux is free: If you want to spend absolutely nothing, you don't even have to pay the price of a CD. Linux can be downloaded in its entirety from the Internet completely for free. No registration fees, no costs per user, free updates, and freely available source code in case you want to change the behavior of your system.

• Linux is portable: Linux is portable to any hardware platform: A vendor who wants to sell a new type of computer and who doesn't know what kind of OS his new machine will run can take a Linux kernel and make it work on his hardware, because documentation related to this activity is freely available.

• Linux was made to keep on running: As with UNIX, a Linux system expects to run without rebooting all the time. That is why a lot of tasks are being executed at night or scheduled automatically for other calm moments, resulting in higher availability during busier periods and a more balanced use of the hardware.

• Linux is secure and versatile: The security model used in Linux is based on the UNIX idea of security, which is known to be robust and of proven quality. But Linux is not only fit for use as a fort against enemy attacks from the Internet: it will adapt equally to other situations, utilizing the same high standards for security

• Linux is scalable: From a Palmtop with 2 MB of memory to a petabyte storage cluster with hundreds of nodes: add or remove the appropriate packages and Linux fits all.

·         The Linux OS and most Linux applications have very short debug-times: Because Linux has been developed and tested by thousands of people; both errors and people to fix them are usually found rather quickly. It sometimes happens that there are only a couple of hours between discovery and fixing of a bug.

Linux Cons:

• Linux is not very user friendly and confusing for beginners: It must be said that Linux, at least the core system, is less user friendly to use than MS Windows and certainly more difficult than Mac OS.

• Is an Open Source product trustworthy? How can something that is free also be reliable? Linux users have the choice whether to use Linux or not, which gives them an enormous advantage compared to users of proprietary software, who don't have that kind of freedom. After long periods of testing, most Linux users come to the conclusion that Linux is not only as good, but in many cases better and faster that the traditional solutions

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History of Linux

                

In order to understand the popularity of Linux, we need to travel back in time, about 30 years ago.

Imagine computers as big as houses, even stadiums. While the sizes of those computers posed substantial problems, there was one thing that made this even worse: every computer had a different operating system. Software was always customized to serve a specific purpose, and software for one given system didn't run on another system. Being able to work with one system didn't automatically mean that you could work with another. It was difficult, both for the users and the system administrators.

Computers were extremely expensive then, and sacrifices had to be made even after the original purchase just to get the users to understand how they worked. The total cost per unit of computing power was enormous. Technologically the world was not quite that advanced, so they had to live with the size for another decade. In 1969, a team of developers in the Bell Labs laboratories started working on a solution for the software problem, to address these compatibility issues. They developed a new operating system, which was UNIX. It was

1. Simple and elegant.
2. Written in the C programming language instead of in assembly code.
3. Able to recycle code.

Linus and Linux

By the beginning of the 90s home PCs were finally powerful enough to run a full blown UNIX. Linus Torvalds, a young man studying computer science at the university of Helsinki, thought it would be a good idea to have some sort of freely available academic version of UNIX, and promptly started to code. He started to ask questions, looking for answers and solutions that would help him get UNIX on his PC.

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