What is Linux?
Linux is a UNIX® clone OS
based on MINIX,
created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds from the University of
Helsinki. Torvalds controls all changes and releases of the
Linux kernel.
For close to three decades, Linux has been one of the most
commonly used and most reliable OSs for servers in the market,
no matter what paid third-party reports that are plaguing the
internet indicate.
Most Linux distributions include a collection of programs
that run on the Linux kernel like X, KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon or
other desktop environments as well as LibreOffice and other
office or home utilities. Under the Linux name, you can get
RHEL (paid subscription, enterprise licensing), Fedora, CentOS,
Ubuntu, Mint (currently my distribution of choice), Mandriva,
Debian, Slackware and many others. When Linux became popular
(c. 1995-99), you could buy disks for any distribution from the
developers or third-party vendors. Nowadays you would most
likely download the distribution of your choice as an
.ISO and burn it to USB drive.
dd if=linux_image.iso of=/dev/sdb1
Installing Linux:
Before trying to install Linux, get a full inventory of what
your computer has. In the past, you might have had to help the
installer recognize the hardware. Nowadays the installer takes
care of most the configuration.
Boot from the USB drive and sit back. The only thing you
would have to decide is if you want to format the whole drive
or share it with another OS.
Depending on the distribution (distro), you might
need to update your installation right away. If the
distro is based on Debian and it has apt as
in the case of Ubuntu and its derivatives like Linux Mint (what
I currently use), you might want to run the following on the
console as root (sudo -i).
apt-get update &&
apt-get upgrade -y &&
apt-get autoclean -y &&
apt-get autoremove -y &&
apt-get purge -y &&
reboot now
The latter runs multiple commands — one after another using
the && (and) operator and then reboot without
confirmation. Of course if you do not need to reboot exclude
the last && operator and the reboot now
command. I would recommend doing the latter on a daily basis to
make sure your system has the most up-to-date packages.
You can also install packages using apt-get calling
the correct package name.
apt-get install <package_name>
apt-get install build-essential # compiler collection from GNU
apt-get install git # version control system
apt-get install lynx # text-only web browser
apt-get install nano # text editor
apt-get install nasm # assembly language
apt-get install pip # package installer for Python
apt-get install python3 # language we all must to learn
apt-get install sqlite3 # relational database
apt-get install tidy # utility to clean up HTML code
Single-Board Computers:
Some vendors have started to offer single-board computer
(SBC) units. For example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released
its Raspberry Pi 1 Model A in 02/2012. After several
generations with a price tag under $50, several projects have
used Raspberry Pi hardware.
