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Preface
The Internet is now a household term in
many countries and has become a part of life for most of the business
world. With millions of people connecting to the World Wide Web,
computer networking has moved to the status of TV sets and microwave
ovens. You can purchase and install a wireless hub with just about an
equal amount of effort. The Internet has unusually high media
coverage, with weblogs often
"scooping" traditional media
outlets for news stories, while virtual reality environments such as
online games and the rest have developed into the
"Internet culture."Of course, networking has been around for
a long time. Connecting computers to form local area networks has
been common practice, even at small installations, and so have
long-haul links using transmission lines provided by
telecommunications companies. A rapidly growing conglomerate of
worldwide networks has, however, made joining the global village a
perfectly reasonable option for nearly everyone with access to a
computer. Setting up a broadband Internet host with fast mail and web
access is becoming more and more affordable.Talking about computer networks often
means talking about Unix. Of course, Unix is not the only operating
system with network capabilities, nor will it remain a frontrunner
forever, but it has been in the networking business for a long time
and will surely continue to be for some time to come. What makes Unix
particularly interesting to private users is that there has been much
activity to bring free Unix-like operating systems to the PC, such as
NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux.Linux is a freely distributable Unix
clone for personal computers that currently runs on a variety of
machines that includes the Intel family of processors, but also
PowerPC architectures such as the Apple Macintosh; it can also run on
Sun SPARC and Ultra-SPARC machines; Compaq Alphas; MIPS; and even a
number of video game consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation 2, the
Nintendo Gamecube, and the Microsoft Xbox. Linux has also been ported
to some relatively obscure platforms, such as the Fujitsu AP-1000 and
the IBM System 3/90. Ports to other interesting architectures are
currently in progress in developers' labs, and the
quest to move Linux into the embedded controller space promises
success.Linux was developed by a large team of
volunteers across the Internet. The project was started in 1990 by
Linus Torvalds, a Finnish college student, as an operating systems
course project. Since that time, Linux has snowballed into a
full-featured Unix clone capable of running applications as diverse
as simulation and modeling programs, word processors,
speech-recognition systems, World Wide Web browsers, and a horde of
other software, including a variety of excellent games. A great deal
of hardware is supported, and Linux contains a complete
implementation of TCP/IP networking, including PPP, firewalls, and
many features and protocols not found in any other operating system.
Linux is powerful, fast, and free, and its popularity in the world
beyond the Internet is growing rapidly.The Linux operating system itself is
covered by the GNU General Public License, the same copyright license
used by software developed by the Free Software Foundation. This
license allows anyone to redistribute or modify the software (free of
charge or for a profit) as long as all modifications and
distributions are freely distributable as well. The term
"free software" refers to freedom
of application, not freedom of cost.
