Linux 101

Linux was originally written by Linus Torvalds in 1991 while attending the University of Helsinki, it was originally intended as a non-commercial replacement for Minix (an educational OS by Andrew S Tanenbaum). Linux is a kernel, this kernel was later augmented with system utilities and libraries from the GNU project which was started by Richard Stallman - founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Today, Linux is a Unix-like operating system contributed by thousands of developers world wide and a prime example of FLOSS. Its place in the evolution of Unix can be illustrated as follows:

Above image is public domain, courtesy of Guillem, Wereon, Hotmocha (copied from old version's history), Christoph S. (redrew the image with Inkscape), Ysangkok (touched up the redrawn image).

A step further is the software distribution package such as Debian. A software distribution is a collection of precompiled applications and the operating system put together in a coherent manner whereby all the dependencies are resolved by the package maintainers. The operating system is made up of the Linux kernel, the GNU system utilities and all the applications which runs on top of them. These precompiled applications save enormous time.

Aside from choosing applications which are stable, the package maintainer also choose base o their social contract. At last count, Debian has over 18,000 packages, precompiled and ready for installation.

Interested readers, read more in wiki

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