Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system and is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone. Besides being freely distributed, Linux's functionality, adaptability and robustness, has made it the main alternative for proprietary Unix and Microsoft operating systems.
Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers. Linux is supported by corporations such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, servers and supercomputers, video game systems such as PlayStation 2, 3, several arcade games and embedded devices such as mobile phones and routers.
Linux was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The current full-featured version is 2.6 (released December 2003) and development continues.The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
Today there are currently over three hundred Linux distribution projects in active development, constantly revising and improving their respective distributions. These include the commercially-backed distributions from Fedora(Red Hat), SUSE Linux(Novell), Ubuntu(Canonical Ltd.) and Mandriva Linux. To the community distributions such as Debian and Gentoo.
Linux’s potential today is not limited to a particular domain. Initially it had been adopted worldwide primarily as a server platform; but now well into its second decade of existence, it has also been gaining popularity throughout the home and office computer systems. Through the efforts of developers of desktop management systems such as KDE and GNOME, office suite project OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla web browser project, to name only a few, there are now a wide range of applications that run on Linux. And this has made Linux the operating system which can be used by anyone regardless of his/her knowledge of computers. Furthermore, the operating system can also be incorporated directly into microchips in a process called "embedding" and is increasingly being used this way in appliances and devices.
