About thirty years ago, Linus Torvalds sent an email announcing the launch of Linux, a free operating system. He referred to it as “just a hobby” and not “big and professional like GNU.” It can be said that in the 28 years since Torvalds released Linux, it has had a tremendous impact on technology and the world at large. However, most people already know the “origin story” of Linux. Here are 28 facts about Linux (the kernel and the larger ecosystem) that you might not know.
1. Linux itself is not very useful, so people began creating Linux distributions, bundling user software together to make it usable and easy to install. The first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS), released in 1992, using the 0.96p4 Linux kernel.
You could purchase it on 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch floppy disks, and if you were a high-tech trendsetter, you could also buy it on CD. If you wanted a graphical user interface, you needed at least 8MB of memory.
2. Although SLS did not last long, it influenced Slackware Linux, which was first released in 1993 and is still being developed today. Slackware is the oldest existing Linux distribution and celebrated its 26th anniversary on July 17 this year.
3. Among all general-purpose operating systems, Linux has the largest installation base. It supports the Top 500 supercomputers, Android, Chromebooks, and various embedded devices like Kindle e-readers and smart TVs (of course, including the laptop used to write this article).
4. When Linus announced Linux, he did not actually release Linux at that time. It didn’t have a name back then; Linus merely described it as “a free operating system,” similar to Minix. Later, Linux was named “Freax,” a combination of “free,” “freak,” and “x.” But imagine how awkward it would be to say “Red Hat Enterprise Freax”? Thankfully, that name was never adopted.
5. Once it had a name, people had to figure out how to pronounce it. Linus himself provided a file on the pronunciation of Linux, which sounds (roughly) like “Leenucks.”
6. Since 1991, it has become somewhat “heavier.” The first Linux distribution was less than 1MB in size, uncompressed. The latest stable kernel (as of the writing of this article, 5.2.7) is about 103MB when compressed, and approximately 946MB when uncompressed. Fairly speaking, it is much more capable now than it was in 1991.
7. Linux was not originally licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The first version simply contained a statement that did not allow for commercial redistribution. In December 1999, the first version under GPLv2 was 0.99. Note that this is just GPLv2.
8. You may notice that there are many choices when it comes to Linux. Really, too many choices! According to Distrowatch, there are over 850 registered Linux distributions. Many of these distributions have been retired or ceased updates over the years.
The site currently lists 260 “active” Linux distributions, which of course includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Linux, CentOS, and many others.
If you count the variants of the major distributions, like Fedora’s Spins, that number will rise dramatically.
At one point, there was even a Linux distribution themed around Hannah Montana. Think I’m making this up? Not at all; it’s true. The world is a strange place!
9. If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you might remember seeing a display about “BogoMips” during system startup. BogoMips is a measure of CPU speed, indicating how many million times the CPU can do nothing per second.
Sounds silly, right? Yes, but it’s also quite useful. Linux needs a counting loop to calibrate the speed of the machine it runs on, hence BogoMips was born. However, it doesn’t have much use otherwise, so the name is a combination of bogus and MIPS, meaning “bogus MIPS.” Nowadays, most systems have a graphical boot screen that doesn’t show BogoMips information at all. That’s fine because the only reason BogoMips survives today is to avoid breaking user space—some user programs evidently still depend on it.
If you’re curious, you can discover your system’s BogoMips information by running cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bog. Each core of the CPU has a BogoMips number.
10. When you boot your computer, Linux is not the first thing that runs. It relies on a bootloader to start up and then hands over the boot operation to the operating system to load device drivers and take control. Is it as simple as using a USB drive or CD to boot the system you want to run Linux on? No, it’s not that simple.
Over the years, Linux has had a series of bootloaders and made significant progress in booting Linux systems. The historic Loadlin bootloader ran in MS-DOS and replaced the running system to start Linux. The first version of SLS Linux required a boot floppy disk each time it was rebooted, or you could try manually configuring LILO.
Over the years, we’ve used LILO, BootX (for Mac), yaboot (also for Mac), the SysLinux series of bootloaders (including bootloaders for booting from ISO images or using PXE protocol for network booting), and GNU Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) versions 1 and 2, along with many other versions.
11. The Linux kernel used to have a version control system where even-numbered versions were for stable kernels and odd-numbered versions were for development kernels. For example, the 2.2 Linux kernel series was a “stable” kernel series, while 2.3 was not a stable kernel. This practice was broken when the 2.6 kernel began to attempt faster releases of new kernels and stopped the long development cycles.
It took about three years for the Linux kernel to reach 1.0, and then just over two years to reach 2.0. Then it took 15 years for the kernel to reach version 3.0, while the release of the 4.0 kernel took less than five years. At this point, the version number jumps are not particularly important; Linus has said, “I won’t read too much into this number.”
12. Initially, Linux was not written for portability. Linus was targeting the 386, and that was it. The first “official” port was the DEC Alpha CPU in 1995. The Linux kernel now runs on a wide variety of CPUs, but support for the 386 itself was dropped in 2012.
13. Linux has thousands of contributors. In 2016, the Linux Foundation identified 13,594 contributors from 2005 to 2016 and calculated that over 22 million lines of code in the kernel came from contributors. This does not even take into account contributors before tracking began in 2005.
14. Most Linux enthusiasts know the official mascot of the kernel, Tux. What many do not know is that Tux was officially dropped during the 2.6.29 kernel cycle and replaced with Tuz.
Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil, or Tux dressed in the skin of a Tasmanian Devil, chosen as the mascot to raise awareness of the species’ endangered status. It was showcased at the Linux.conf.au conference in 2009. Attendees received plush toys of Tuz, and the traditional charity auction at Linux.conf.au raised about AUD 40,000 for the Save the Tasmanian Devil campaign.
15. In January 2001, one of the first successful worms targeting Linux appeared. The Ramen worm targeted wu-ftpd, nfs-utils, and lprng and served as a warning that as Linux gained popularity, we would see an increasing share of worms, viruses, and other attacks targeting Linux.
16. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) adopted Linux for mission-critical systems in 2007.
17. Without Linux, there might not be Git. Linus Torvalds created Git for the development of the Linux kernel because he was unhappy with the existing version control systems at the time. Thus, Linux is not only responsible for building a vast ecosystem around the operating system, but it also laid the foundation for today’s most popular social development platform.
18. Once upon a time, Apple sponsored a project that ran Linux on the Mach microkernel on the Apple Power Macintosh platform. This was seemingly Apple’s first foray into open source before officially launching Darwin in 1999.
The first version was called MkLinux, co-developed by Apple and The Open Group (TOG) in France. It was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 1996 but never gained popularity. By 1998, it became a community-driven effort and remained a niche project within the larger Linux ecosystem.
19. Before Google, finding content on the internet was a challenge. In 1998, some enterprising Linux enthusiasts created a “Linux Search Engine” to help users find information about Linux distributions, Linux user groups, and other Linux-related information. Sadly, the content of the search engine (more precisely, a directory) has disappeared into the mists of time.
20. Android brought Linux to the phones of millions, but it was not the first phone to run the Linux kernel. That honor arguably belongs to the Motorola A760, which was released in 2003 with a video player, music player, instant messaging, and other goodies.
21. The first commercial Android phone was the HTC Dream, released in September 2008. This phone featured a physical keyboard, a mini trackball, and a resolution of up to 320×480. In the 11 years since then, smartphones have made tremendous advancements, but some of us still miss physical keyboards.
22. The first publicly released version of Red Hat was released on Halloween in 1994. It was a beta (0.9) version that came with the stable Linux kernel 1.0.9 or, if you were adventurous, it also came with the 1.1.54 development kernel. (And let’s face it, if you were using Linux back in 1994, you were really adventurous!)
23. As we have discussed, Linux has expanded into many areas since its inception. It is used for a dazzling array of workloads, from consumer devices like e-readers to AI/machine learning workloads on large clusters. But did you know there is also a Linux orchestra?
The Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork) is a “laptop orchestra” from Virginia Tech’s Digital Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio (DISIS). L2Ork is described as a “modern cross-media ensemble” that combines “traditional orchestras with increasingly popular human-computer interaction technologies to explore the expressiveness of gestures, public interaction, environmental agnosticism, and the multidimensionality of art.”
If this description leaves you scratching your head, you can watch a video on YouTube about L2Ork and enjoy the soothing sounds of Linux.
24. If orchestras are not your thing, you can experience more pastoral charm on Linux, literally.
One of Linux’s unexpected jobs over the years has been… milking cows. Delaval’s “Voluntary Milking System” (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked and manages the milking process without human intervention. All of this is managed by a single-board computer running Linux.
25. If you appreciate compact and affordable laptops, you might want to thank Linux. The launch of the Asus Eee PC was a driving factor behind lowering costs and focusing on lighter, more portable machines. The Eee PC was a lightweight, compact, and affordable “netbook” that launched in 2007 for less than $300. The keyboard on the first-generation model was also smaller than a standard keyboard, so if your hands are larger than average, good luck. Importantly, the Eee PC came with a custom Linux distribution, meaning you didn’t have to pay for the operating system itself.
Netbooks were eventually replaced by tablets, smartphones, and Chromebooks. But it was an interesting experiment that Linux made possible.
26. Installing Linux is not always easy, but sometimes it can be fun. When disks are slow and installers ask a lot of questions, Caldera OpenLinux’s installer offered a Tetris-like game that you could play while installing Linux on your disk.
Unfortunately, the Anaconda installer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not offer Tetris or any other games. That’s fine because installing Linux on modern hardware is usually much faster than the slow disks and CD-ROMs of the past.
27. It is well known that Linux is everywhere in the field of filmmaking today. If you see a movie with a lot of CGI, it is likely that the rendering for that movie was done on Linux. At least, the first major movie known to use Linux was “Titanic.” Digital Domain used a network of 200 Alpha machines running Red Hat Linux to speed up rendering times.
28. The Linux kernel is not released on a set schedule, so how would you predict when the next kernel version will be released? How about using a crystal ball? According to the “PHB Crystal Ball” website, the average development time for a kernel is 68 days, with a merge window of 13 days. According to the site, the next kernel is expected to be released on Sunday, September 19, 2019.
Happy 28th Birthday, Linux!
The history of Linux is filled with fascinating facts and stories, so this article is just a small glimpse into that history. As they say, the best is yet to come. While Linux’s past is interesting and impressive, its future looks equally exciting. Happy Birthday, Linux! Wishing you a happy birthday! Linux!
