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Linux Turns 17 Today
Meshach writes "Over at the Linux Journal, Doc Searles is noting that today marks 17 years since Linus posted to Usenet, starting Linux (post). As a Linux user at work and at home I say, thanks Linus!" The anniversary is also featured on the top page of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
One more year and it should be legal.
[insert witty sig here]
..until Microsoft can legally fuck Linux in the asshole... these days though it seems like Linux is going to be the one "giving it". Smile Balmer :)
It is currently meant for hackers
OMG SHUT IT DOWN!!!
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
HURD turned 18 this year (22 if you count the first failed attempt).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No google logo for this?! I expected a penguin or something like that.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
That article was a POS. It's pretty much content-free.
Poorly researched. No explanation of what Linux really is. No real explanation of why it's come as far as it has.
Wikipedia looks comprehensive and accurate in contrast.
--
BMO
No fun. I wanted to register 128.214.6.100 but GoDaddy won't let me...
\x72\x6D\x20\x2D\x72\x66
Its called Ubuntu and he is supposed to be 60 years old and lives as a zoo keeper, naming all of his projects after various animals there.
"The anniversary is also featured on the top page of the Encyclopedia Britannica"
Britannica is overrated, wake me when it make the first page of wikipedia ;-)
"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane" -PKD
Holy crap, Linus almost sounds like he was humble back then. Apparently all that fame and power since has turned him into a complete cock.
Yaya, mod me down as flamebait, but the guy really needs to get off his high horse.
Has it really been that long???
I remember being excited when 0.95b came out. It had a parallel port driver, and I could print on these flat cellulose sheets made from dead trees. You young whipper snappers probably don't know anything about that...
Congrats! 17 years and almost 2% of the market share. This is the year!
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Somebody indulge me, but why is the *17th* birthday of the kernel worthy of main page? Slow news day?
15, 20, 25, etc. yes. But 17?
Time keeps flowing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
and some of the best tags I've ever seen.
Keep up the good work!
By 1999 an estimated seven million computers were running on Linux, still available free of charge, and many major software companies had announced plans to support it. Meanwhile, Torvalds had taken a position with Transmeta Corp., owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, working on a top-secret project that many in the high-tech community assumed would involve some future assault on the Microsoft empire.
outdated and erroneous much?
Britannica is so crap compared to Wikipedia. The article on Linux seems to have been written in 1999, and the description of Linux as an operating system would not make Stallman happy.
I'm gonna need a spec.
"For a definition of Linus Torvaldis, see Merriam Webster"
OMG! I read TFA all the way to the end! And on this day of all things!!
/me hides
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
"Barely Legal"
I record my sleeptalking
Obligatory:
1991 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1992 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1993 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1994 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1995 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1996 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1997 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1998 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 1999 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2000 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2001 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2002 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2003 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2004 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2005 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2006 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2007 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!, 2008 - This is the year of the Linux desktop!
Stupid whitespace filter, yadda yadda
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Lets not forget to thank Richard for the great userland GNU provided (or the busy box folks if you use your linux on a small device)
I swear, it's like some kind of geek Woodstock. Just like every baby boomer was at Woodstock, every geek says he ran Linux in '91. Guys who merely downloaded Slackware floppies? Please...we ran 0.1 and compiled it ourselves blah blah...
Advice: on VPS providers
Happy birthday Linux...one more year and you vote and go off to Iraq and fight terrorism.
No. Perhaps we are not so new to this that we can remember the silly LiGnuX suggestion for gnu advertising purposes and then two years later the GNU/Linux suggestion for the same reason. The article was about linux and not the very useful gnu tools which are a completely different project.
It was several years ago but I'm still going to say "Stop trying to correct the old folks that have a clue and get off my lawn newbie!". Bah, the kid probably doesn't even remember the emacs fork gobdarnit.
The right date is September 17th, not October 5th. But year after year people keep messing it up. Don't believe me, look here
Hey, quiet you! Stop complaining and get back to work!
...probably the best place to ask this... Hey what happened to the year 2038 bug? Does this mean linux is supposed to die at menopause or something?
Well while you're thanking Linus, don't forget to thank Richard M. Stallman, without whom Linux (a.k.a. GNU/Linux) would not exist as we know it today. GNU is 24 years old, preceding Linux by 7 years.
Sound's like someone has read the Unix-Hater's Handbook
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix.
Ah, the good old days, when websites were short and to-the-point: "nic.funet.fi"
Of course, this was back when colleges and universities ran most of the popular hacker sites. before the dark time. Before Microsoft.
Now everything's "msdn.microsoft.com", buried six pages deep in active server pages.
And had been used on all electronic voting machines in brazilian elections today. With a superior performance than the previous OSes, VirtuOS and Windows CE.
Not free software! When Linux was first announced and released it was not free software. It became free in 1992 when Linus rereleased it under the GNU GPL. (See the release notes for version 0.12.)
Join the Free Software Foundation
I remember printing earlier versions on an old Okidata tractor fed serial printer. I think it was V 0.91.
Of course I had to do some coding to get the printer to form feed, but that's what it cost back then to be on the bleeding edge.
/you had to put the printer in compressed mode first because some of the lines were too long.
<sigh> There was a lot to learn in that code. For an eager student it was like being a kid in a candy store. And much of it was very, very bad.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've been using Linux for well over a decade and would like to thank $Linus && $co for all their hard work over the years.
use Linux;
$Linus = "Linus Benedict Torvalds";
($co) = Linux::get_all_contributors();
A small tribute in code if you will :)
$co includes that lovable rogue RMS and his band of merry hackers ;)
May Linux continue to kick *$$ for many decades to come.
Live long and prosper!
--
unix_geek_512
Loyal Linux and open source user and OSS quasi-evangelist
Windows was originally released in November 1985, making it 25 years old next month.
I prefer Linux to Windows the way I prefer a car to carrying a mule on my back. But is Linux today as useable an OS as Windows was in 2001 (when NT 4.0 was still its highpoint - possibly still the case)?
--
make install -not war
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix.
This brings tears to my eyes...
I didn't know, that Hurd was already in development back than...
And 17 years later... it's still not done...
Even the Firefox spell checker does not know it... It recommends "Turd". *lol*
Hey, it does not know "Firefox" too. Oh well...
Think of what happened if Linus had waited* for Hurd instead...
[* Is that correct English? It's not my first language... I don't know...)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
From Linus Usenet Post:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows) [...]
It HURDs so much to see that everyone uses and supports this years-old hack instead of a real OS with a concept. It would already be released and stable, if you all didn't fall for this swedish trick!
Duh
Thanks! =) You've made my day. :D
... and while we're at it, where the hell is my flying car, my cure for cancer, my interstellar travel and my time machine.
Jesus, people! Wake up - no one is working on the currently unachievable technologies they should be!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
...coz, lord knows, it was an ugly baby.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
No problem. Your points are valid.
It's easier to make a case that Stallman has been hindering the advancement of Linux, rather than helping it.
No one other than the handful of people who already had our own private versions of hand rewritten versions of Unix utilities really care anyway. Desktop users do not.
And as to programming skills ... I do not think of Linus as the very best programmer in the Linux kernel world today (I'd rate AKPM, Al Viro and Davem higher), he's very good ... but as a manager and arbiter of programming taste, he gets top score. He knows how to trust people and delegate responsibility and get things done at a rate I would have considered impossible 10 years ago.
I owe Linus and all developers many thanks as they provided me (and many F/LOSS fans with me) with an awesome system! Let's go for the next 17 years!
The wise are not erudite, the erudite not wise!
You sick son of a bitch. How could you take advantage of a young, vulnerable operating system like that? An operating system less than 18 years of age is incapable of informed consent, and should not be "used", as you put it.
I'll be calling the Feds on you, and God help you if they find any screenshots of Linux on your computer.
I'm in Canada, where it's 16. (Used to be 14 until last year.)
Next year Linux will turn 18, which means that Linux will be mature. So thÃt means that...
Next year is the year of Linux on the desktop! I can feel it!!!
Here be signatures
There was an article?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
...or was it really August 26th, 1991?
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/thread/76536d1fb451ac60/b813d52cbc5a044b?lnk=gst&q=&rnum=32#b813d52cbc5a044b
Although, I guess the birthday really is the day it was released. August was more around the time "mommy got knocked up" rather than popped a baby out.
(define (reduce f l) (if (null? (cdr l)) (car l) (f (car l) (reduce f (cdr l)))))
If they can have an October revolution in November, we can have your September birthday in October, damn it!
In other news, Microsoft is trying to figure out what the fascination of high uptime is all about. Sandy Thomas a spokeswomen for Microsoft was quoted saying, "We are striving to reduce the requirement for reboots every few weeks. Our current goal is no more than once every three months. That should help people get to 99.3% uptime." 08:23:07 up 5426 days, 23:37, 5 users, load average: 0.62, 0.55, 0.34
#~: whatis linux
linux: nothing appropriate
#~:
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
First Off! Happy Birthday Linux... So people have not been able to pronounce Linux as in; (Linus but with an X at the end..{I.E.not as in lennox the ac guy}), for 17 years.. whew!! P.S. boy this ought to start a word fight.. huh??? P.S.#2 Thank You Linus.. for starting a revolution that hopefully won't stop until every-one's involved..(My mission in life is to show the world...(or anyone who cares),what Linux can do for you..(the people who don't know about Linux)... jammeramd64
I've used Linux for the past ten years after first seeing it mentioned in BOOT magazine (along with BeOS). My initial frustration with it led me to join a LUG and the big struggles back then were getting X11 running, configuring a sound card and getting PPP working. The latter led me to write an article for MaximumLinux magazine (Killer PPP) and eventually contribute to the Red Hat/Fedora Unleashed series with Bill Ball and continue writing for LinuxFormat magazine. Lot of good people and lots of fun. Those were great times and it is good in many ways to see how Linux has grown, but also troubling to see how much like "them" it has become. There have been efforts to replicate the success of Linux, but I suspect that the perfect combination of time, place, and people will be elusive. And by the way, EVERY year has been the year of Linux on the desktop -- if you were smart enough. Hoyt Duff
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Not only that, but it was a negative term before, too.
A "hack" is an ugly thrown-together bit of code that is used because "it works" rather than coming up with a proper solution. A "hacker" is someone who largely produces this low quality, but mostly functional code.
But, conversely, a hacker is also somebody who's comfortable dealing with that mess - someone who understands the machine well enough to be able to work with it, without necessarily wrapping every little thing in a comfortable abstraction. It's someone who, when confronted with something they're not entire able to handle, is willing to wade through the difficulty and confusion until they find their solution. This is important: not everybody is up for that. A "hacking" approach isn't the best way to deal with things from a professional, engineering standpoint, but on the other hand, if you're doing something as a hobby, the rigors of a professional approach aren't always the best choice, either.
Honestly, I'm OK with the fact that people don't agree on the usage of the term. It's just like any other niche group in society: those in the group have their own terminology and attitudes and everything and those outside the group will tend to see things differently. That's life, you know? You deal with it.
I've always thought "cracker" was just plain an awkward term to try to use, even before one considers the "honky" association. Personally I would call people who set out to ruin other people's systems "computer-vandals" or maybe "malicious hackers". Don't worry, I don't have any delusions of changing what words they use on the news... But when I talk to friends, or other people who are inclined to listen to what I have to say, I'll set 'em straight.
Bow-ties are cool.
(Incidentally, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I think the 28th of September was also a fairly important anniversary ...)
You know, I really respect the GNU project and everything the FSF has accomplished... And really a lot of the things on that list were, in fact, accomplished...
But what really strikes me about that old RMS post is how much it reminds me of all the times I've gotten really excited about something I was planning to make, told everybody I could about the project and all the grand things I'd accomplish and then... often, nothing would come of it. The real similarity here, I guess, is the posting that comes out of the "initial excitement" stage of the project, before there's anything substantial to actually show... (I usually try to avoid postings like that, these days...)
Bow-ties are cool.
GNU/Linux/X.org/Qt/KDE/Mozilla
It goes left-right from most fundamental to the system to least, in the order of use. I suspect.
OK, but consider this:
On the one hand, the damn system can't boot without the kernel. It is the fundamental environment upon which all the other tools must run. That's pretty frikkin' "fundamental to the system"...
And then, on the other hand, you can't do anything with the bloody thing without the shell, the legion of tools running in the shell, or the compiler and C library used to build all that stuff...
So you got a mutual dependence going on here: GNU can't run without a kernel, and the kernel's no good without an operating environment running on top of it...
I think splitting hairs on this issue is pretty ridiculous. Terminology does not equate to respect. I respect the GNU project, I just don't believe in straining my word choice as a way to share that respect with others. Simply saying "Linux" communicates the nature of my PC's software environment quite effectively.
Bow-ties are cool.
happy bday penguin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just a few more years from now, and it should have caught up to Windows 95!
According to "Back to the Future 2", the Cubs will win the World Series in 2015. My prediction is that 2015 is ALSO the year of Teh Lunix on Teh Desktop.
Long Live Teh Lunis!!!
Wow. Some entirely unsourced statements from an AC. That's real credibility, there.
Yes, thank you community.
No, seriously, this year is it!
I mean, last year, when it was buggier and didn't have as much hardware/software support...well, sure, in retrospect...I'll admit that it wasn't ready (even though myself and the other Linux fans were saying it was)...but this year; it REALLY IS.
We've made a LOT of improvements! It's faster, easier and just as secure as ever. It supports practically everything you could want RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX. I mean, just install and it, mostly, kinda, just works. And well, the few things that don't....well, trust me those aren't things you'll own or anything.
Yup - Linux is finally here! Finally ready to be a big player. In 2 years from now it should be the most popular desktop OS.
^^^---- In an attempt to be green; Linux fanboys have been using the EXACT SAME POST FOR THE LAST ~12 years.
Thank you for setting us FREE. Five years windows free. sidux on both my desktops, and Debian Lenny on my Eee PC 701 which boots in 20 seconds to KDE. From wikipedia: (not that it is always accurate) "Linux (commonly pronounced IPA: /ËlÉnÉ(TM)ks/ in English; variants exist[1]) is a Unix-like computer operating system family which uses the Linux kernel. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; typically all the underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.[2]
Predominantly known for its use in servers, it is installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from embedded devices and mobile phones to supercomputers.[3]
The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The GNU contribution is the basis for the alternative name GNU/Linux.[4]"
Debian Sid LXDE Firefox 3.6.4
GNU/Linux and Firefox, surfing the internet safely.