About Linux

Linux is a Unix-like operating system for many platforms (including Intel 80x86, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, Sparc, Mips).

Originally it was written by a student from Finland, Linus Torvalds, and is now maintained by Linus and a loosely knit team of programmers from entire world. It's distributed under Gnu GPL licence what allows cost-free installation.

Linus and team prepare only successive versions of kernel (present versions are about 2.0.0, previous stable version was 1.2.13 - still popular), other groups of people prepare system libraries.

Linux is distributed as few distributions, made up of the system itself, and a large set of utility programs created during Free Software Foundation's Gnu project. Additional utilities are created by the maintainers of the distribution and are used for programs installation, system maintaining, etc. Most popular distributions now are Slackware (historical distribution), RedHat (currently most popular) and Debian (in my opinion the best of those).

List of programs available under Linux is pretty big, and still grows. It includes for example many programs known under other systems (like WordPerfect), great packages available only for Linux, that are potential free competition for commercial products from other systems (like great wordprocessor - Lyx, office packet Andrew, etc.). Many programs which are commercial for other systems are free for Linux.