Happy Birthday Linux, Thank you Linus
The twenty-fourth birthday of the Linux kernel was the top story today. Linux' birthday is widely celebrated on August 25, the day of Linus' original post, while others mark the birthdate as October 5, the day of the first public release. Lots of sites paid homage with several running through the time-line of its life. Elsewhere, a couple articles sang Open Source praises today and DarkDuck seemed confused by Knoppix.
Happy Birthday Linux! Whether you celebrate today or in October, Linus and his creation have changed the world. From the underpinnings of the Internet, commerce, and the stock market to your smartphones, televisions, and routers Linux runs the world. It may not have the desktop market, but on everything else Linux rules. Linus Torvalds himself readily admits he could have never imagined the impact that first post or his creation would someday have. Linux spawned a whole economic sector and brought Open Source software into prominence.
Glyn Moody reminisced today about the early days as well as an interview conducted "in his flat in Helsinki." Unix and Minix were early inspirations, but lack of resources was the motivator. Linus didn't want to pay the exorbitant price of these commercial operating systems, so he just wrote his own. Moody gets into the nuts and bolts of the creation of Linux and is a good summary of those early years.
OpenSource.com marked the day by posting a time-line beginning with 1991, the year Linux was announced and released. Debian and Slackware began in 1993 and the kernel hits version 1.0 in 1994. Linux 2.0 came in 1996 and 2.2 was released in 1999. 2.4 came in 2001 and 2.6 was released in 2003. Linux 3.0 arrived in 2011 and 4.0 was released earlier this year. Gerald Pfeifer from SUSE posted a wider view of Linux and how it came to rule the World.
Blogger DarkDuck today wrote, "I faced no particular issue when working with Knoppix 7.4.2 in Live session, though, I still struggle to find a place in the Linux world where this distribution would fit the best." Many years ago Knoppix was one of the first (if not the first) Live CD. That alone was groundbreaking and gave Linux users a handy dandy tool for data recovery, hardware troubleshooting, fixing bootloaders, and a portable Linux in general. It was also famous at the same time for having the best hardware detection and auto-configuration of all the distributions available. Again, a handy tool for users. Yeah, the founder began to focus his efforts into accessibility applications for Linux for his wife and his distro feels a bit dated and lost these days. Nevertheless, Knoppix has earned its place in the hallowed halls of pioneering tech.
Jonathan Riddell today announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.4.0 bringing a new Audio Volume applet designed for PulseAudio, big ugly fullscreen GNOME-like application launcher, new icons, new network applet graphs, better DPI support, and a tech preview of Wayland support. The documentation has been updated and re-written, several improvements were made to the clock applet, and a new monitor configuration was added. The full changelog is available as well.
In other news:
* 10 ways open source tech is changing the rules of the game