What Is Linux? 
Linux is the kernel of operating systems that look like and perform as well or better than the Unix operating system from AT&T Bell Labs. Linus Torvalds and a loosely knit team of volunteer hackers from across the Internet wrote (and still are writing) Linux from scratch. It has all of the features of a modern, fully fledged operating system: true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared, copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and TCP/IP networking. Most people, however, refer to the operating system kernel, system software, and application software, collectively, as "Linux," and the convention is used in these tips as well. Linux ran originally on 386/486/586-based PC's, using the hardware facilities of the 80386 processor family (TSS segments, et al.) to implement its features. There are now many ports to other hardware platforms. (See "What Ports to Other Processors Are There?") See the Linux INFO-SHEET for more details. See also "Where Can I Get the How-Tos and Other Documentation?" The Linux kernel is distributed under the GNU General Public License. (See "Is Linux Public Domain? Copyrighted?") There is a historical archive of all versions of the Linux kernel at http://ps.cus.umist.ac.uk/~rhw/kernel.versions.html.
Giving Linux a try requires a machine with an Intel 386, 486, or 586 processor, with at least 2MB of RAM and a single floppy drive. To do anything useful, more RAM and disk space is needed. For most uses, at least 4MB is required, and you will need to use special installation procedures until the disk swap space is installed. Linux will run comfortably in 4MB of RAM, although X apps will run slowly because they need to swap out to disk. Some recent applications, such as the later versions of Netscape, require as much as 64MB of physical memory. There is a distribution, Small Linux, that will run on machines with 2MB of RAM. VESA Local Bus and PCI are supported. MCA (IBM's proprietary bus) and ESDI hard drives are mostly supported. There is further information on the MCA bus and which cards Linux supports at Micro Channel Linux. Linux runs on most current laptops with a decent X display. For details of exactly which PCs, video cards, disk controllers, and so on work, see the Hardware How-To. There is a port of Linux to the 8086, known as the embeddable Linux kernel subset (ELKS). This is a 16-bit subset of the Linux kernel which will mainly be used for embedded systems. See www.linux.org.uk/Linux8086.html for more information. Linux will never run fully on an 8086 or 286, because it requires task-switching and memory management facilities not found on these processors.
Linux supports multiprocessing with Intel MP architecture. See the
file documentation/smp.tex in the Linux kernel source code
distribution.
There are a handful of major Linux distributions. For information about them and how they are installed, see Matthew Welsh's Installation and Getting Started, or IGS for short. It's located at the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) Home Page and on the Linux FAQ home page. The information in IGS is somewhat dated now. More up-to-date information about first-time Linux installation is located in the Installation How-To on the LDP page. Commercial distributions have begun to appear on the shelves of many book and electronics stores in the last six months, at least in the U.S., and some hardware vendors now ship systems with Linux preinstalled. There is a very thorough installation guide on line at heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/linux.html. Most of the distributions are available via anonymous FTP from various Linux archive sites. There are also many other releases, which are distributed less globally, that suit special local and national needs. How Should I Pronounce Linux? This is a matter of debate. I have heard it pronounced as we would pronounce his name in United States. That is with a long i sound as in Island, as well as with a short i sound as in pickle. If you want to hear Linus himself say how he pronounces it, Click Here Of course he pronounces his own name (Linus) as Leenus. In my opinion, the Leenux or the long i versions are both exceptable. To correspond with Linus, check out his home page in Finland. http://www.cs.Helsinki.FI/~torvalds/
The Linux trademark belongs to Linus Torvalds. He has placed the Linux
kernel under the GNU General Public License, which basically means
that you may freely copy, change, and distribute it, but you may not
impose any restrictions on further distribution, and you must make the
source code available.
This is not the same as public domain. See the Copyright FAQs, found at rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/copyright, for details. Full details are in the file copying in the Linux kernel sources (probably in /usr/src/linux on your system). The licenses of the utilities and programs which come with the installations vary. Much of the code is from the GNU Project at the Free Software Foundation, and is also under the GPL. Note that discussion about the merits or otherwise of the GPL should be posted to the newsgroup gnu.misc.discuss, not to comp.os.linux hierarchy.
For other legal questions, subscribe to the linux-legal mailing list, by sending a message
with help in the body to
majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu.
Linux uses the standard MS-DOS partitioning scheme, so it can share your disk with other operating systems. Note, however, that many other operating systems may not be exactly compatible. DOS's fdisk.exe and format.exe, for example, can overwrite data in a Linux partition, because they sometimes incorrectly use partition data from the partition's boot sector rather than the partition table. In order to prevent programs from doing this, it is a good idea to zero out, under Linux, the start of a partition you created, before you use MS-DOS or something else to format it. Type: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdXY bs=512 count=1 where hdXY is the relevant partition; for example, /dev/hda1 for the first partition of the first (IDE) disk. Linux can read and write the files on your DOS and OS/2 FAT partitions and floppies, using either the DOS file system type built into the kernel or mtools. There is kernel support for the VFAT file system used by Windows 9x and Windows NT. There is reportedly a GPLd OS/2 device driver that will read and write Linux ext2 partitions. There are said to be NTFS drivers under development, which should support compression as a standard feature.
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