FreeBSD rose from the ashes of 386BSD, the original effort to port BSD to the Intel chip, and claims a code lineage that reaches back to Bill Joy's Berkeley Software Distribution of the late seventies. The 386BSD port was begun in 1989 by Bill and Lynne Jolitz, and was destined to be the original free Unix-like operating system for the IBM PC.

Linux is a UNIX like operating system and has been one of the most popular proponents of free open source software. Even though popularly GNU/Linux is called Linux operating system, but the name is somewhat misleading because Linux is the name of the kernel of the operating system, which was created by Finnish hacker Linus Torvalds as a hobby project

"The GNU operating system is a complete free software system, upward-compatible with Unix. GNU stands for “GNU's Not Unix”. Richard Stallman made the Initial Announcement of the GNU Project in September 1983. A longer version called the GNU Manifesto was published in September 1985 [...] By 1990 we had either found or written all the major components except one—the kernel.

Linus Torvalds is remarkable, not only for being the technical genius who wrote Linux, but for then being able to inspire and lead an enormous team of people to devote their free time to work on the operating system and bring it to maturity. We sent Richard Morris off to interview Linus, and find out more.

Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. At the core of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental program on the computer: It does all the basic housekeeping and lets you start other programs.

Even though Linus Torvalds has always been known as a deity-like figure in the world of Linux, lately he has been quite outspoken about where he thinks his operating system is going and what its competitors are doing wrong.

Continuing the series of trying to come up with reasons for choosing an operating system, FreeBSD will be discussed. Although FreeBSD is not Linux, it is Unix-like, nonetheless. I have never used FreeBSD and all things discussed here are second-hand knowledge.

Linux (pronunced: /ˈlɪnʊks/, lin-uks) is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released.

In this interview Torvalds looks back on the operating system he created, the impact of new hardware, and the ubiquitous OS on everything from cellphones to desktops to supercomputers.