What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning? [LWN.net]

What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning?

Posted Jan 1, 2007 15:35 UTC (Mon) by grouch (subscriber, #27289)
In reply to: What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning? by Arker
Parent article: The Ultimate Distro (Linux Journal)

It might be appropriate here to mention an older work:

Linus began to experiment with his own hacks, using Minix as scaffolding to develop a new program. "I made two processes and made them write to the screen and had a timer that switched tasks," he recalls. "One process wrote A, the other wrote B, so I saw AAAA, BBBB, and so on."
[...]
GNU's aim was to write a complete "free" version of Unix - the kernel and all the associated elements - that is, one that gives users the freedom to share and change software but not add restrictions and impose them on others. With the Linux kernel, Stallman says, "the available free software added up to a complete system."
Rather than wait for someone to write applications designed specifically for his operating system, Linus tweaked Linux to perfectly fit GNU's pre existing apps. "I never ported programs," Linus says. "I ported the kernel to work with the programs. Linux was never the primary reason for anything - user programs have always been the reason."
-- The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was, Glyn Moody, August, 1997

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What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning?

Posted Jan 5, 2007 20:13 UTC (Fri) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link]

Interesting juxtaposition, but the connection he's trying to suggest by
it isn't really there. "Just for Fun" goes into a lot more detail, such
as the fact that the system call reference he used to implement his
system call list was the SunOS manuals in his university library. (And
nobody calls it Sun/Linux.) The working Unix systems he had lying around
were Minix and the university's MicroVax he dialed into to access the
internet. (And you'll notice Linux grew out of his terminal program for
dialing into that MicroVax, he wrote the term program to boot from a
floppy because Minix's serial handling couldn't even keep up with 2400
baud without dropping characters, and he had to take over all the
hardware himself to get his home PC to talk to the university machine.)

You might also want to read the first year of the linux kernel
mailing list (which was pretty low traffic back then). Back when I did
that, I bookmarked a bunch of posts I found interesting when I read
through it, and strung the posts together into two files:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html
http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1992.html

What packages are mentioned? Several minix files, the mtools package
(from isc, not fsf), X11 is a pervasive early goal (since that's the big
thing minix just couldn't do). In 1992 mentions of gnu tools start
showing up, but the emacs he used was microemacs and version 0.12
included pmake from bsd. The first networking support was through the
KA9Q package.

Kernel development being driven by running real applications doesn't have
anything to do with gnu. This is not mere opinion, I've been researching
computer history for years. http://landley.net/history/mirror

Rob