A Historical Look At The First Linux Kernel

LinuxFan writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating article about the first Linux kernel, version 0.01, complete with source code and photos of Linus Torvalds as a young man attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally planned to call the kernel "Freax," and in his first announcement noted, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He also stressed that the kernel was very much tied to the i386 processor, "simply, I'd say that porting is impossible." Humble beginnings."

Comments

Re:Note the mention of GNU

[sayfawa]

Maybe if the GNU folks had only been working on a kernel instead of also doing the hundreds of other programs as well, they would have made more headway with HURD. And if Linus had been trying to do a whole OS and not just the kernel, Linux the kernel would still be early in development.

The mention of GNU should merely point out how important the GNU is in GNU/Linux. As Linus said in the post: Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft.

Re:Note the mention of GNU

[Just Some Guy]

This is an example why open source projects are more effective when they're driven by pragmatism and not politics.

The problem is that politics is interested in you even if you're not interested in it. The pragmatic approach involves taking politics into account even if you're personally bored to tears by the subject.