Linux history

By 1990, the GNU project, founded by Richard Stallman , developed and constantly developed free programs that make up the basic tools for developing programs in the C language : Emacs text editor, gcc C compiler , gdb program debugger , bash command shell , essential functions library for C programs libc . All of these programs were written for operating systems similar to UNIX . Therefore, they used standard UNIX system calls - POSIX . Using system calls, programs gain access to RAM , file system , input and output devices . Due to the fact that system calls looked more or less standard in all implementations of UNIX, GNU programs could work (with minimal changes or no changes at all) in any UNIX-like operating system.

Using the available GNU tools, it would be possible to write C programs using only free software, but there was no free UNIX-compatible kernel on the basis of which all these tools could work. In such a situation, the GNU developers were forced to use one of the patented implementations of UNIX, that is, they had to follow the architectural solutions and technologies adopted in these operating systems and base their own developments on them. Stallman's dream of scientific software development, free from solutions driven by commercial goals, was not feasible, while free patents were based on the patented UNIX-compatible kernel, the source texts of which remained a mystery to developers.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds , a Finnish student , was extremely enthusiastic about writing a UNIX-compatible operating system kernel for his personal computer with a processor that became the very widespread Intel 80386 architecture. The prototype for the future kernel was the MINIX operating system: a UNIX- compatible operating system for personal computers that booted from diskettes and fit in the very limited memory of a personal computer at that time. MINIX was created by Andrew Tanenbaum as an educational operating system that demonstrates the architecture and capabilities of UNIX. It was a full-fledged core for your PC that Linus Torvalds wanted to make. He gave the name to his kernel freax, but later it was changed by the host of the ftp server on Linux - a hybrid of the name of the creator and the word UNIX .

UNIX compatibility at this point meant that the operating system must support the POSIX standard. POSIX is a functional model of a UNIX-compatible operating system, which describes how a system should behave in a given situation, but does not give any indication of how it should be implemented by software. POSIX described those properties of UNIX-compatible systems that were common to different implementations of UNIX at the time of the creation of this standard. In particular, POSIX describes the system calls that an operating system compatible with this standard should handle.

The most important role in the development of Linux was played by the global computer networks Usenet and the Internet . In the very early stages, Linus Torvalds discussed his work and the difficulties encountered with other developers in the comp.os.minix newsgroup on Usenet, dedicated to the MINIX operating system. The key decision of Linus was the publication of the source code of the still underdeveloped first kernel version under the free GNU GPL license . Thanks to this, the increasingly popular Internet, many people were able to compile and test this kernel themselves, participate in the discussion and correction of errors, and send corrections and additions to the Linus source code. Now more than one person worked on the core, development went faster and more efficiently.

In 1992, the Linux kernel version reached 0.95, and in 1994, version 1.0 was released, indicating that the developers finally found that the kernel as a whole was finished and all the errors were (theoretically) corrected. Currently, the development of the Linux kernel is already a matter of a much larger community than at the time before version 1.0. The role of Linus Torvalds himself has changed: now he is not the main developer, but the most authoritative member of the community, traditionally evaluating the quality of the source texts, which should be included in the core, and giving its go-ahead for their inclusion. However, the general model of free development by the community is maintained.

However, as it is impossible to make an operating system without a kernel, so the kernel will be useless without utilities that would use its capabilities. Thanks to the GNU project, Linus Torvalds immediately got the opportunity to use free utilities with Linux: bash , the gcc compiler , tar , gzip, and many other already well-known and widely used applications that could work with its UNIX-compatible kernel. So, Linux immediately got into a good environment and, in combination with GNU utilities, was a very interesting environment for software developers, even at the very early stages of its development.

The principal step forward was the fact that for the first time it became possible to make a completely free operating system from the Linux kernel and utilities and applications, that is, to work with a computer and, moreover, to develop new software using only free software. The ideal of a completely non-commercial development formulated by Stallman could now be brought to life.

Soon the theoretical possibilities of the embodiment of the ideal appeared, but this did not mean its immediate practical realization. The compatibility of Linux and the GNU utilities was due to the fact that both were written with a focus on the same standards and practices. However, within this practice (that is, when there are many different UNIX systems), there was a lot of room for incompatibility and different solutions. Therefore, at the initial stage of kernel development, every GNU application earned on Linux was another achievement for Linus. The first were bash and gcc. Thus, the combination of GNU and Linux made it possible to create a free operating system, but by itself did not constitute such a system, because Linux and various GNU utilities remained scattered software products written by different people, not always taking into account what others did . The main property of any system is the consistency of its components.

After a certain period of development, a number of the most important GNU utilities have worked stably on Linux. A compiled Linux kernel with a small set of GNU utilities already compiled on Linux was a set of tools for a software developer who wanted to use a free operating system on his personal computer. In this form, Linux was not only suitable for developing Linux, but was also an operating system in which it was possible to perform some applied tasks. Of course, the first thing you could do in Linux was to write C programs.

When the task of getting a computer with Linux system constantly working on it has become popular and quite widespread, the developers at Helsinki and Texas universities create their own sets of floppy disks, from which the compiled kernel and main utilities can be written to the hard disk, and then the operating system can be loaded directly from it. These sets of floppy disks were the first prototypes of modern Linux distributions - software sets, on the basis of which you can get a working operating system on your computer. It should be noted that from the very beginning, the Linux distribution included GNU software products. In fact, whenever it says "Linux operating system," it means "the Linux kernel and the GNU utilities." The Free Software Foundation recommends calling it the Linux operating system.

However, copying all the necessary programs onto a hard disk is not enough to get an operating environment suitable for the user's needs (even if it is a very professional user). Therefore, the first sets of floppy disks can only conditionally be called distributions. To get a working operating system, you need some special tools for installing and configuring software. It is the presence of such tools that distinguishes modern Linux distributions. Another major task of the distribution is regular updates. Software, especially free, is one of the fastest growing areas, so it’s not enough to install Linux once, you need to update it regularly. The first distro in the modern sense, which became widespread, was Slackware , created by Patrick Volkerding . It was already widely known to Linux users by 1994.

Despite the fact that with the advent of the first distributions, Linux installation no longer requires self-compiling of all programs from source texts , the use of Linux remained a lot of developers: the user of the operating system with him at that time of its development could be engaged almost exclusively in programming. At least, in order to solve other everyday application tasks in it (for example, reading e-mail , writing articles, etc.), he had to first work on programming and even developing Linux itself for some time in order to create appropriate application programs for himself. or make them work in linux.

All software for Linux was open, so soon more and more application programs for Linux began to appear that were used by an ever larger community, which made them safer and got all the new functionality. In the end, the idea arises that with Linux and GNU applications for Linux, targeted efforts of a small group of developers can make complete operating systems suitable for a very wide range of users and sell these systems to users for money as an analogue and alternative to existing proprietary operating systems.

The benefit of an entirely free software operating system is obvious - those who compile this system should not pay anyone for the programs included in it. Moreover, the further development and updating of existing programs is conducted by the developer community also completely free of charge, no need to pay employees who would do this. As a result, the cost of the company collecting the Linux distribution for the user is limited to paying programmers who integrate disparate applications into the system and writing programs to standardize installation and setup procedures to facilitate these tasks for the unprepared user, as well as the cost of self-publishing the resulting distribution. For the end customer, this means a fundamental reduction in the price of the operating system.

The first successful company operating under this scheme was Red Hat , which appeared in 1995. Red Hat addressed its developments not only to programmers to professionals, but also to ordinary users and system administrators, for whom the computer is primarily an office workplace or a work server. Focusing on the existing offers on the market for such a class of users, Red Hat has always paid great attention to developing applications with a graphical interface to perform typical tasks of setting up and administering the system. Red Hat's business was developing quite successfully, in 1999, this company was incorporated - right after the issue, stocks grew in price very vigorously, but then the hype subsided. Currently, the share of Red Hat in the market of servers and workstations Linux is very large. Thanks to Red Hat, the RPM package format has become very common in the Linux user community.

Almost simultaneously with Red Hat, the Debian project appeared. His task was about the same - to make a complete distribution of Linux and free software GNU, but this project was conceived as a fundamentally non-commercial, implemented by the developer community, the rules of interaction in which fully comply with the ideals of free software. The Debian developer community is an international community whose members interact via the Internet, and the rules for the interaction between them are defined by special documents - policies .

The developer community does not extract any profits from the sale of Debian, its versions are distributed freely, are available on the Internet, and can also be distributed on solid media ( CD , DVD ), but even in this case their price rarely greatly exceeds the cost of the media and the premium that pays for publishing costs. . Debian development was originally sponsored by the Free Software Foundation . First of all, the recipients of Debian distributions were professional users who were somehow connected with academic software development, who were ready to read the documentation and organize the necessary system profile with their own hands, corresponding to their specific tasks. The orientation to such an audience predetermined some of the trends in the development of Debian: it never had an abundance of “simple” graphical tools for setting up the environment, all kinds of “wizards”, but much attention was always paid to the means of consistent and uniform integration of software into a single system. It is in Debian that the package manager ( APT ) appeared. Debian is currently the most popular Linux distribution among users who are professionals in the field of information technology security, as it has the highest response rate to detected threats. [1] [2] [3]

Whenever free software is in demand, many alternative solutions immediately arise — as was the case with Linux distributions. After 1995, a huge number of commercial companies and free communities emerged (and continue to emerge) that have as their task the preparation and release of Linux distributions. Each of them has its own characteristics, its own target audience, its own priorities. To date, several leaders have emerged on the distribution market, which offer more or less universal solutions and are the most widely known and used. In addition to the already mentioned Red Hat and Debian, it is necessary to name among the distributions oriented to the ordinary user, German SuSE and French Mandriva (until 2005 - Mandrake), among those addressed to specialists - Gentoo . But in addition to the "big" players in the distribution market there are much more less common distributions. Now before the user who wants to install Linux, there is a question of choosing the distribution The selection criteria are the tasks to be solved with the help of Linux, the level of user training, the technology, and upcoming contacts with the community that develops the distribution.

It turned out that in the international community of developers who started and continued to develop Linux, all to one degree or another could be explained in English . This is not surprising, since historically English has been the language of computer science and the UNIX operating system, the global Internet, programming. In the international community of software developers, English performed and performs a function comparable to the role of Latin in the scientific community of medieval Europe . But if Linux is supposed to be used not only for programming and communicating with programmers, but also for solving everyday tasks, then localization is necessary, that is, the ability to communicate with a computer and using a computer in languages ​​other than English.

Localization is a complex process affecting the most diverse aspects of the system. To fully support one or another language in the system, you must first ensure that you can enter in this language (support for keyboard layouts and encodings), output (support screen fonts ), print, and then you need to translate the interface of various applications into this language, develop tools for preparing electronic and paper publications in this language, etc.

The first company that has set itself the goal of producing Linux distributions for Russian- speaking users was UrbanSoft . Her entire business consisted in the production and sale of CDs with free software distributions. First of all, these were Red Hat distributions, as well as Debian, which included packages for Russification developed by UrbanSoft.

Somewhat later in Moscow, the IPLabs Linux Team releases the Linux Mandrake Russian Edition - a modified (to meet the needs of the Russian user) version of the Mandrake Linux distribution. Subsequently, this team begins to release distributions that differ from Mandrake not only in the presence of packages for Russification, but also in other fundamental features. In the end, the development team creates the company ALT Linux and begins to produce distributions under the brand name ALT Linux .

The purpose of the company ASPLinux was the release of Red Hat with modifications to support the Russian language. The name of their product coincides with the name of the company.

All the listed Russian manufacturers of Linux distributions exist to this day, continuing to release distros more or less actively. However, they are losing popularity, since now distributions popular throughout the world, such as Ubuntu or Fedora , are quite well translated into most languages ​​of the world.

• Linux history (Unsolved) . The appeal date is August 15, 2010. (not available link)
• Free system for free people (review of the history of the Linux operating system) (Neopr.) . The appeal date is April 7, 2011.