UNIX achieved its widespread propagation, its penetration of the UNIX history university domain, and its reach into research and industry due to its early dissemination by AT&T to all interested parties at almost no cost and as source code. UNIX's present functionality emanated not just from AT&T developers but also from external developers who used the product and contributed their own further developments, which they then put at AT&T's disposal. (Consider the contributions of the University of California at Berkeley, for example.) With the rising commercialization of UNIX by AT&T (now by Novell) since 1983, such creative and cooperative further development became increasingly restricted, and UNIX source code today has become unaffordably expensive and scarcely accessible. Linux provides interested computer scientists and us"ers with a system that revives the old UNIX tradition: Linux is available for free, and everyone is heartily invited (but not obliged) to free & participatory contribute to its further development. Since Linux runs on PC systems, it has begun to penetrate the workrooms of many computer science students and computer freaks.
Linux: Unleashing the Workstation in Your PC is a complete and highly detailed guide to Linux installation, configuration, administration, and networking. It will also introduce you to many of the available add-ons, applications, and tools, including the X-Window system, text editors, relational databases, typesetting systems, languages, compilers, and TCP/IP utilities. It describes a full installation and configuration from the popular Slackware 2.1.0 distribution on a 32-bit Intel system, but the discussion can be easily adapted to many other distributions by a knowledgeable user. The book assumes that the reader has a good degree of familiarity with computer systems, but it is well adapted to those who want to learn the details of Unix systems for the first time.
Author Stefan Strobel has coauthored a companion volume, Linux Universe: Installation and Configuration , a book/CD-ROM package which includes a full installable version of Linux 2.0 and a detailed installation guide for that version. Both Linux: Unleashing the Workstation in Your PC and Linux Universe: Installation and Configuration are available in a single package, The Complete Linux Kit.
Linux is free a 32-bit multitasking operating system for 32-bit Intel and other industry-standard processors that closely resembles Unix. It supports multiple users, TCP/IP networking, and much of the peripheral hardware found on today's systems. Originally written by Linus Torvalds, Linux is now the product of a global community of interested programmers and is licensed through the Free Software Foundation.