basic - continued

[J]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:22, Tero Pesonen <ubuntu-users at tpesonen.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 23:11 +0200, Rafiq Hajat wrote:
>> Thank you Linus - may God bless you for starting this whole wonderful
>> movement!
>
> Not Linus. Gnu/Linux was, if I understand correctly, started by Richard
> Stallman in the early 1980's.

The GNU project was launched in the early 80's.  Linux was created by
Linus Torvalds in the very early 90's and released to USENET in 91.

GNU was made up of all freeware tools, and Hurd, the GNU kernel.  Hurd
went nowhere, but eventually, Linux was adopted and the term GNU/Linux
was born.

And here's a blurb from the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd) :
"Development on the GNU operating system began in 1984 and initially
made good progress. Free GNU tools started to acquire a good
reputation and were often adopted in preference to proprietary tools
provided by system vendors.[citation needed] By the early 1990s, the
only major component missing was the kernel.[4]

Development on the Hurd began in 1990 after an abandoned kernel
attempt in 1986, based on the research TRIX operating system developed
by Professor Steve Ward and his group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer
Science (LCS).[5] According to Thomas Bushnell, the initial Hurd
architect, their early plan was to adapt the 4.4BSD-Lite kernel and,
in hindsight, "It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have
succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place
today".[6] However, in 1987, due to a lack of cooperation from the
Berkeley programmers, Richard Stallman proposed instead to use the
Mach microkernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon University. Work on this
was delayed for three years due to uncertainty over whether CMU would
release the Mach code under a suitable license.[5]

With the release of the Linux kernel in 1991, the primary user of
GNU's userland components soon became operating systems based on the
Linux kernel (Linux distributions), prompting the coining of the
controversial term GNU/Linux.

Development of the Hurd has proceeded slowly. Despite an optimistic
announcement by Stallman in 2002[7] predicting a release of GNU/Hurd
later that year, the Hurd is still not considered suitable for
production environments. Development in general has not met
expectations, and there are still bugs and missing features.[8] This
has resulted in a poorer product than many (including Stallman) had
expected.[9]

The Debian project, among others, have worked on the Hurd project to
produce binary distributions of Hurd-based GNU operating systems for
IBM PC compatible systems.[10]"





-- 

Charles de Gaulle  - "The better I get to know men, the more I find
myself loving dogs." -
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html