Linux^[*] is a member of the large family of Unix-like operating systems . A relative newcomer experiencing sudden spectacular popularity starting in the late 1990s, Linux joins such well-known commercial Unix operating systems as System V Release 4 (SVR4), developed by AT&T (now owned by the SCO Group); the 4.4 BSD release from the University of California at Berkeley (4.4BSD); Digital UNIX from Digital Equipment Corporation (now Hewlett-Packard); AIX from IBM; HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard; Solaris from Sun Microsystems; and Mac OS X from Apple Computer, Inc. Beside Linux, a few other opensource Unix-like kernels exist, such as FreeBSD , NetBSD , and OpenBSD .

Linux was initially developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991 as an operating system for IBM-compatible personal computers based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Linus remains deeply involved with improving Linux, keeping it up-to-date with various hardware developments and coordinating the activity of hundreds of Linux developers around the world. Over the years, developers have worked to make Linux available on other architectures, including Hewlett-Packard’s Alpha, Intel’s Itanium, AMD’s AMD64, PowerPC, and IBM’s zSeries.

One of the more appealing benefits to Linux is that it isn’t a commercial operating system: its source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL)^[†] is open and available to anyone to study (as we will in this book); if you download the code (the official site is http://www.kernel.org ...