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20 years of Linux, interview with Linus Torvalds.

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There is a story over on Slashdot about the 20 year anniversary of the Linux operating system.  Linux has come a long way in the 20 year history and now it is a very robust and reliable operating system. Since Linus Torvalds needed a free version of the proprietary UNIX operating system that existed at the time, he started work on a his own version of the OS that became the Linux kernel. He started work on the Linux kernel, using the UNIX-like operating system MINIX in 1991. Nowadays, even mobile telephones such as the Google Android series use Linux as well as the Nokia N900. The TiVo video recorder also runs a modified Linux kernel and the TiVo Digital Video Recorder (DVR) operating system to enable television recording and playback  powered by open source software. The main benefit of running Linux for a web server and embedded applications is the low memory requirements of the operating system as you do not need a desktop environment installed for a simple web server that is easily administered remotely with Webmin or through SSH. And the Linux kernel is customized without any stress through the menuconfig interface before building it to select or disable drivers and options you may or may not need. This means you can disable the compilation of PCMICIA drivers if you are on a desktop PC. As well as building the kernel for your specific CPU type. This is a very powerful feature as well as the various distributions of Linux that are tailored to many roles, such as media center or penetration testing. Backtrack is a good example of the latter. As well as the awesome Knoppix Live DVD, that is perfect for fixing your system and recovering Windows files from a corrupted installation.

You can not do that with Windows, it uses the kernel compiled by Redmond and you have to put up with the annoying quirks present in the NT kernel. I have found the best thing about using Linux when installing a new hard disk is that I created two partitions with gparted about 240 gigabytes each and formatted them and it only took gparted a couple of seconds to format each partition, it takes Windows ages to do that. That is why I like to use Ubuntu to take care of partitioning and file management tasks. The drive in question was a 500 gigabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 16MB SATA 7200RPM hard disk that I purchased to extend my computer`s storage space. If Windows had a proper file-system like ext4 then it would be much faster and would run much smoother to boot. I have installed a previous hard disk a while ago, a 500 gigabyte hard disk identical to the one I recently purchased and Windows XP disk management took hours to format the 230 gigabyte partitions. But Microsoft software is not always the best solution, even MSN Hotmail runs on Apache/FreeBSD servers. But considering the amount of traffic that service receives every day it is unlikely that the server would be able to scale handle that much traffic without downtime. The NT/IIS combination works for some websites but a UNIX/Linux LAMP server is better for others. Here are my existing Linux and Windows partitions, the large ones are for storing multimedia files on /dev/sdc, that is the hard drive I bought most recently and /dev/sdb is the drive with Ubuntu 11.04 and finally, /dev/sda is the hard drive with Windows 7. The partitions are NTFS to share files easily between Windows and Linux. Adding a SATA hard disk is so easy these days, not having to worry about master and slave jumper settings and other annoying IDE idiosyncrasies that I am glad to leave behind. A SATA cable has only one connection per cable and this makes the whole installation as simple as plugging in the SATA cable and the power supply cable from the PSU and you are set.

thx@Morgoth:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc</code>
 
Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00036257
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1       30596   245760000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2           30596       60802   242625536    7  HPFS/NTFS
thx@Morgoth:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
 
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8cfdd929
 
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       31871   256002048    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2   *       31871       44774   103643136   83  Linux
/dev/sdb3           44775       60072   122880000   83  Linux
/dev/sdb4           60072       60802     5858305    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5           60072       60334     2097152   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6           60334       60802     3760128   83  Linux
thx@Morgoth:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
 
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b2eeb
 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13       19458   156185600    7  HPFS/NTFS
thx@Morgoth:~$

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