Linux OS Shows Steady Growth
Kernel Version 2.0 Soon to Be Released
The Linux operating system is enjoying "quiet but impressive growth"
according to Alan Fedder, UniForum board member and president of the Washington,
DC-area Unix User Group.
Linux is a Unix operating system based on a kernel developed by Linus Torvald
of Finland with the assistance of an informal assemblage of programmers
across the Internet. The platform provides multitasking, virtual memory,
shared libraries, demand loading, TCP/IP networking and other capabilities.
Linux is distributed as freeware, although several companies in the United
States and elsewhere provide enhanced versions along with applications and
other support.
Fedder, who is also executive director of Linux International, believes
that Linux could become a major presence in open systems, especially on
Internet servers. He cited a survey recently completed by Jim Fetters of
Mirai, a consulting company in Chicago, that showed that almost 10 percent
of Internet servers ran on Linux, placing it second only to SunOS and Sun
Solaris as a Unix Web server platform; Linux is running on twice the number
of servers as Windows NT. "If the application software is developed,
it will continue to grow rapidly. It's a wonderfully stable, solid operating
system" Fedder adds. "Every time I see benchmarks, it blows away
Windows NT and other forms of Unix."
Further broadening the base of Linux users, Apple Computer has recently
announced that it is supporting the Open Software Foundation to port Linux
to a variety of Power Macintosh computers. The Linux-based Macs will be
designed primarily for scientific/engineering applications.
Linux enjoys great popularity among many programmers. Because the kernel
is essentially developed as a labor of love, they see Linux as resembling
what Unix "used to be" in the early days of its inception: a technology
freely developed not by market pressures but by the sheer love of finding
the best technical solution to a problem, in this case, an open operating
system.
Mark Bolzern, president of WorkGroup Solutions, Inc., a Linux vendor based
in Aurora, CO, emphasizes the virtues of this pure, "technology-driven"
aspect of Linux. He claims that the resulting product is "highly open,
and [the code] is extremely clean." Version 2.0 of the Linux kernel
will be soon released. Bolzern explains that it will add:
- much faster networking
- on-the-fly loading and unloading of modules (such as device drivers)
- symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
- expanded IDE, SCSI and CD-ROM support.
Additional information on Linux is available on the Web from Caldera, Inc.,
a Linux vendor from Orem, UT. Its Web address is http://caldera.com.