We know that in Market a lot of Operating systems are available. Microsoft was the monopolist kings in  OS field for a long. Their Disk Operating System (MS DOS) caught early market. Then they introduced the MS Windows with more graphic facilities. A number of versions for the same came in OS market and some of them are still favourites of  some people. The latest version is Windows 7.

As a challenge to MS Windows there came Linux as a free operating System and is gaining market putting Microsoft in to trouble. Here I  give a very small information about that OS which even frightened the monopolies in IT World , Microsoft.

Linux is an Operating System originally developed by Linus Tolvalds. He was a student in Finland when he developed the operating system. Now this operating system is used in Super computers, servers, computers  , PDAs and so many more.

Linux had began as Minix. Actualyy Minix  was an educational version of Unix. The developer of Minix was Andrew Tannenbaum. Linux grew as a cheap UNIX that ran on Intel based Personal Computers. Unix was not free software on that days.

Actually Linux is Just an OS kernel produced under the direction of Linus Tolvalds. Linux comes with a set of utilities like web servers and compilers. It has the GNU C compiler namely GCC. But we may confuse because Linux has more than one versions.

Many organisations collected versions of all the programs with Linux kernel . Then it was tested again to know the working  condition. If it works well it is released and is called a distribution of Linux. The main Linux distributions at present are RedHat , SUSE ,  Linux Mandrake , Knnopix , Ubuntu , Debian etc. According to the choice of the user any one of this distribution can be used.