About Linux

Linux (officially GNU/Linux) started out when in the beginning of the nineties a Finnish student, Linus Thorvalds, wanted to create an operating system that opened up the power of Unix to ordinary Intel-based home PCs. He based his creation on the Minix kernel (a kernel is the heart of an operating system). After quite some intensive programming he offered his creation to the Internet community by posting a message in a newsgroup. Lots of improvements have been made by the Internet community. The Linux sourcecode now is open and publicly available: everyone can create his own version.

But Linux was only a kernel. It only became a real operating system when the GNU tools were added to it. Linux was a kernel without a system, GNU was a system without a kernel. They were joined and GNU/Linux was born. Nowadays, the GNU part of GNU/Linux is erroneously left out (only the Debian distribution still uses it).