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The Linux project started in 1991, in a bedroom in Finland. Linus Torvalds, then a college student, had written the outline code for a new UNIX-style operating system kernel for his 386 PC, which was then posted on an Internet bulletin board for others to try out. Quite a few people became interested, and quickly started contributing improvements to the code. The Linux movement had begun.

The penguin mascot, known as Tux, has now become a well-known icon for Linux devotees around the globe. Tux has come to symbolise the extraordinary growth of Linux, which has taken many people by surprise. Perhaps the first milestone of note was the version 1.0 kernel, released in 1994. Not surprisingly, this was the first Linux version to achieve more widespread usage, and the effects of a growing user base and a rising profile started to snowball.

Things moved rapidly after the initial release, with kernels 1.2 and then 2.0 appearing by 1996. Advanced capabilities and increasing hardware support helped Linux appeal to more and more hobbyists who wanted to try it out. At the same time, several Linux companies were formed, and began to market complete distributions of the operating system, with full GUI desktops and a collection of useful applications and utilities, most of them from the GNU project. Linux began to achieve more significant penetration as a small server platform, and among programming enthusiasts.

During the late nineties, the world started to notice, and web sites, as well as magazine publications, sprung up all over the place. More recently, the launch of the 2.2 kernel in 1999, after three years in development, heralded the inclusion of a new level of cross-platform support and advanced networking technology in Linux. By now, thousands of talented programmers all over the world were contributing to the code base.

The take-up of Linux on the desktop has been a little slower, but with the advent of two highly capable, attractive and user-friendly desktop environments, namely Gnome and KDE, many people are at last beginning to see Linux as a viable challenger to Windows. The mainstream distributions have come a long way since the early days, and now offer intelligent installation programs, vast quantities of high quality free software, and excellent support networks for inexperienced users.

See a typical screenshot of KDE

Given the sophistication of Linux, and the effort involved in developing it, how can it be free? There's no one answer to this question, but recent history has demonstrated that the open source model for software works admirably.

The idea is that no-one should own the software, or be able to control it. A core belief is that anyone who uses the software should have access to its source code, and be able to modify or improve it as they wish, as long as they contribute those improvements back to the open source community. This model is formalised under the GNU General Public License, which covers the Linux kernel itself, and virtually all the accompanying software in most distributions.

From its humble beginnings, Linux has evolved into a cutting edge, fully-fledged operating system, with all the sophisticated power features you would expect from commercial UNIX offerings.

The newest Linux kernel, version 2.4, was released at the start of 2001, and offers symmetric multiprocessing support for up to 32 CPUs, a multithreaded networking stack with full TCP/IP support, new firewalling technology, advanced memory management, continued legendary stability, improved peripheral support, and the ability to run on 10 hardware platforms, including several 64-bit architectures. Even more powerful features are being developed in the 2.5 development kernel series, which has just been launched.

Linux is an enormously flexible operating system, in part because you can custom-build a kernel with the features you want. So far, Linux has proved most popular in server roles, and already runs a third of the entire Internet's web servers, steadily grabbing market share from established commercial rivals.

As the popularity of Linux grows exponentially, so does the number of distributions available. The established companies, such as Red Hat, face new competition in the form of an army of specialist distributions that cater for the needs of specific user groups. Whether you're after an all-purpose distro, a lightweight one for an older system, or one that's tailored for graphics or programming, there's highly likely to be one available already.

Of course, all this fragmentation is often cited as a disadvantage of the platform. Linux is not one operating system, like Windows or the other UNIX variants; rather it's a whole family of diverse operating systems, built around the same kernel. However, an important standard was recently published by an influential grouping of industry leaders. Called the Linux Standards Base, it defines a common set of basic system tools that should make up a compliant Linux distribution, and defines a standard filesystem hierarchy. It is likely that the leading Linux vendors will soon start adopting the LSB standard, which will make the lives of developers much easier when writing applications to work on any Linux system.