NIX achieved its widespread propagation, its penetration of UNIX history U the 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 many 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 (and the current owner, Novell) since 1983, and with the philosophical wars between the large UNIX vendors such as Sun, HP, Digital, IBM, SCQ, and the UNIX laboratory, as well the more rhetorical than factual discussions between QSF and UNIX International, such creative and cooperative continuing development became increasingly restricted, and UNIX source code today has become unaffordably expensive and de facto inaccessible. Linux has changed the situation. Linux provides interested computer scientists and users with a system that revives the old UNIX tradition: Linux is available for free, and everyone is heartily free & participatory invited (but not obliged) to contribute to its continuing development. When I wrote the foreword to the first edition of this book in 1994, Linux, because it ran on PC systems, had 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.
