Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
Sat, 30 Apr 2005, by kevanf1@gmail.com: [..]
Ok, number one, I have always been led to believe that Linus Torvalds developed Linux (not his name but given that name by the later developers) as part of his university course. It was first and foremost developed as a secure and stable operating system in a similar way to Unix but for running on IBM compatible PC's. Please, say if I'm wrong.
Not really, in his own words: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones"
Theo
Corrrect, I saw the email on the Minix newsgroup, downloaded linux, built floppies that booted and did a few rudimentary things. Quite rapidly it developed to where I could boot it up from HD using bootlace/shoelace from Minix. My Minix partitions turned into Linux ones to the point where I saw I could ditch Minix all together, with olvwm added, I ditched the boot to WFW3.11 and ran it on Sun's WABI under Linux, when Sun decided to drop development of WABI and eventually it wouldn't work with Linux when we changed to glibc, I think, I had 95 on the work laptop. Later Sun bought Staroffice - I knew something was in the offing when Staroffice 5.0 for Solaris surfaced before the Linux version - finally Staroffice allowed me to follow the suggestion, in the words of my colleague Kevin late one night when we were putting together a CD package of tools to go on top of RedHat so we could deploy Linux worldwide across the company "F*** it, I'm blowing away 95 from my laptop", we both left the office with Linux on both our laptops (only 2G HD's), without a trace of Windows anywhere and never looked back, thanks to Citrix for their Linux client and later Cisco for their Linux VPN client, also to wine for the ability to run Lotus Notes. Now we have the free Flightgear flightsim and not expensive X-Plane with quite an advanced flightsim certified by the FAA. Even buying software, it's still cheaper than any legal Windows solution and I've heard you need 2 XP licenses to run 2 XP boxes or a family license for a restricted number of boxes. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks