Linux Project Professor Glen Gray Department of Information Systems IS 311 TTh 3 30 4 45 PM Luis E Solis Charles Chong Dina Rodriguez Shreejana Singh Himanshu Kathuria Introduction The development and growth of the Linux operating system parallels that of the personal computer and the Internet The growth of the personal computer was made possible by the use of open architecture standards That is hardware specifications were not proprietary to any specific vendor Therefore many vendors develop and produce the same components for the PC As a result of this competition the cost of the PC was greatly reduced due to economies of scale Linux is yet another operating system It is significant because its design and development are driven by the needs of those who use it not a commercial entity driven by its own monetary gain Linux is rooted in the community of software developers dedicated to producing a quality operating system The human readable instructions that realize the Linux operating system are freely available These instructions are collectively called source code This makes Linux and open source operating system It is the antithesis of the proprietary model that most mainstream operating systems follow Linux is licenses under the GNU General Public Licenses GPL This ensures that the source code will always be freely available to anyone wants it TCP IP and the Internet The TCP IP protocol is the communication conventions that the Internet uses to connect or internetwork different hardware technologies The internet technology hides the details of network hardware and permits computers to communicate independent of their physical network connections The internet technology is an example of open system inter connection It is called open because unlike proprietary communication systems available from one specific vendor the specifications are publicly available The entire technology has been designed to facilitate communication among machines with diverse hardware architectures to use almost any network hardware to accommodate a wide variety of applications and to accommodate multiple computer operating systems The TCP IP protocol allows us to discuss computer communication independent of any particular vendor s network hardware Programmers do not need to build a special version of application software for each type of computer or each type of network Instead software built to use TCP IP is general purpose the same code can be compiled and run on an arbitrary computer The University of California s Berkeley Software Distribution commonly called Berkeley UNIX was the first to incorporate and implements TCP IP protocols and utilities for network services that resembled the UNIX services used on a single machine for use with UNIX operating system The original UNIX was first developed in 1969 when minicomputers and mainframe computers were the norm in the corporate world UNIX is the basic operating system of which there are different versions from different vendors such as Sun Microsystems or HewlettPackard Open Source Linux 2 Because the specifications of the Internet was publicly available the Internet is one of the most successful open source open protocol projects It is the success of the Internet that makes it possible in 1991 for Linus Torvalds a college student to use the Internet in a collaborative fashion to develop and release the kernel of the Linux operating system At the University of Helsinki Torvalds was running the Unix like operating system Minix on his 386 computer Minix was written from scratch by Andrew S Tanenbaum a Dutch professor who wanted to teach his students the inner workings of a real operating system It was designed to run on the Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market Unhappy with some of the limitations of Minix and fueled by the desire to explore low level hardware programming Torvalds began to develop his own operating system Richard Stallman and the free software foundation also began work on an alternative operating system in the mid 1980s In 1990 they had develop functional alternatives to every major UNIX component except for the kernel The combined work of Torvalds and Stallman became the Linux we know today The Linux is a clone of the UNIX operating system and does not contain any proprietary UNIX code Since the Internet was mostly created and implemented on UNIX based computers many of the products and software components available on the UNIX are also used in Linux Linux models the UNIX operating system in many respects It strives to be POSIX compliant the open standard used to maintain compatibility with various versions of UNIX It was therefore easy to port TCP IP over to Linux making this operating system very Internet friendly Trovalds and Stallman made the source code of the operating system freely available over the Internet so other programmers can collaborate modify and improve the program Since all the Internet protocols are supported the Internet community quickly embraced and developed Linux into an Internet aware operating system Linux has an official mascot the Linux Penguin which was selected by Linus Torvalds to represent the image he associates with the operating system he created Please see timeline figure 1 Linus Torvalds The Linux operating system Operating system is a generic term that is used to describe several families of systems In a single task system only one program may be run at a time and therefore only one person may work on the machine at one time However the process may use the whole of the resources and power of the computer unit In multi task systems several processes can be executed in parallel Operating time is cut into small intervals and each process is executed during these short periods In order to have efficient execution of these processes complex prioritization and scheduling algorithms are 3 used to ensure optimum sharing between the processes The system may be multi user as well as multiprocessor Linux is a member for large family of UNIX like operating system The Linux operating system is composed of the operating system kernel and a base set of utilities and scripts The kernel is the heart of the operating system and is responsible for managing the system hardware The base set of system programs utilities and scripts helps the kernel perform its task and provide basic user functionality With the standard kernel model the entire kernel and the base set of programs are loaded