The history of Linux is closely related to GNU. The GNU project started in 1983, and is dedicated to developing a free and complete unix-like operating system, including software development tools and various applications. By the time 199 1 released the Linux kernel, GNU had almost completed the development of all kinds of necessary software except the system kernel. With the efforts of Linus Torvalds and other developers, GNU components can run on the Linux kernel. The whole kernel is based on the GNU General Public License, that is, GPL (GNU General Public License), but the Linux kernel is not part of the GNU project. 1March, 994, the Linux version 1.0 was officially released. Mark Ewing created Red Hat software and became one of the most famous Linux publishers.
Strictly speaking, the word Linux itself only refers to the Linux kernel, but in fact people have become accustomed to using Linux to describe the entire Linux-based kernel, and using GNU engineering tools and applications (also known as GNU/). Linux operating system). Linux software based on these components is called Linux distribution. General Linux distribution contains a lot of software, such as software development tools, databases, web servers (such as Apache), X Window, desktop environment (such as GNOME and KDE), office suite (such as OpenOffice.org) and so on.
During the period from 199 1 to 1995, Linux developed from the conceptual version of 0. 1 kernel prototype to a special Unix operating system with equivalent performance and characteristics, and beat Unix in some important statistics, such as continuous normal business hours. Most of them are. 1995, Linux found its killer application, Apache, an open source web server. Like Linux, Apache is very stable and efficient. Soon, Linux machines running Apache became the first choice for global ISP platforms. About 60% of websites use Apache, easily beating the other two major proprietary competitors. Today's LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has become the first choice to build a Web server.