Red Hat® Linux 6 Unleashed
Copyright 1999 by Sams
Welcome to Red Hat Linux! This book has brought together a team of authors to help you learn the details about installing, administering, and using the latest version of the best alternative computer operating system for today's PCs. In the back of this book you'll find a CD-ROM that contains Red Hat Linux 6.0, the most recent version, as well as all the software you need to get started. Linux is the core of the operating system, the kernel, while the Linux operating system and its collection of software are formally known as the distribution. Many of the programs in the Linux distribution come from Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD UNIX, and the Free Software Foundation's GNU software suite. Linux melds SysV UNIX and BSD features with POSIX compliance and has inherited many of the best features from more than 25 years of UNIX experience. Linux has also helped provide the recent impetus for the Open Source Software movement.
First released on October 5, 1991, by its author and trademark holder, Linus Torvalds, and then at the University of Helsinki (now at Transmeta in California), Linux has spawned an increasingly vocal legion of advocates, users, and contributors from around the world. Originally written as a hobby, Linux now supports nearly all the features of a modern multitasking, multiuser operating system.
Red Hat, Inc., is a computer software development company that has sold products and provided services related to Linux since 1993, and whose revenues have gone from a little over $400,000 to more than $10 million in the last several years. Red Hat's mission is to "provide professional tools to computing professionals." Red Hat provides these professionals tools by doing the following:
- Building tools, which Red Hat releases as freely redistributable software available for unrestricted download from thousands of sites on the Internet
- Publishing books and software applications
- Manufacturing shrink-wrapped software versions of the Linux OS, making Linux accessible to the broadest possible range of computer users
- Providing technical support
Red Hat's customer-oriented business focus forces it to recognize that the primary benefits of the Linux OS are not any of the particular advanced and reliable features for which it is famous. The primary benefit is the availability of complete source code and its freely distributable GNU General Public License (also known as the GPL; see the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE in the back of this book). This gives any home, corporate, academic, or government user the ability to modify the technology to his or her needs and to contribute to the ongoing development of the technology to the benefit of all users. Working with Linux provides benefits such as security and reliability that commercially restricted, binary-only operating systems simply cannot match. Some of these benefits follow:
There are no royalty or licensing fees. Linus Torvalds has control over the Linux trademark, but the Linux kernel and much of the accompanying software is distributed under the GNU GPL.
Linux runs on nearly any CPU. Linux runs on more CPUs and different platforms than any other computer operating system. One of the reasons for this, besides the programming talents of its rabid followers, is that Linux comes with source code to the kernel and is quite portable. Linux for Intel-based computers (typically known as PCs) can be found on this book's CD-ROM.
