Starshine Technical Services Linux

Linux: The Operating System

Linux is the most widely used free operating system. (Technically Linux is an operating system kernel, and any collection of software which has been ported to it; see the GNU Project Home Page to split those hairs). GNU/Linux is one of several freely available operating systems.

Linux and FreeBSD are a couple of our principle hobbies -- they are also tools that we use extensively. There are two people behind starshine.org, Heather Stern and Jim Dennis.

Jim's Linux Interests

In the Linux community I'm probably best known for my work as the Linux Gazette Answer Guy over the last three years. My wife, Heather Stern has been doing all my HTML editing for the Answer Guy column for the last couple of years. She's created a separated comprehensive index. I also recently published a book Linux System Administration with my co-authors M Carling and Stephen Degler. One minor contribution I've made is to create a patch to allow tripwire to complile cleanly under Linux. However, this is probably unnecessary now. If you like, read a discussion of why you don't need my old tripwire patch. Linux is a big subject, which I spend a fair amount of time investigating. Since Linux is a "product" of the Internet almost all of the work and documentation that's relevant to it is available on the web.

I have some local mirrors to the LDP, Linux Gazette. I also have a page of links to LDP documents and other documentation resources arranged by topic

The official sources for the Linux kernel are now at The Linux Kernel Archives which is apparently sponsored by Transmeta Inc. -- the company where Linus Torvalds works.

Linus is, of course the "father" of Linux. He started the phenomenon back in about 1992 (?) and invited readers of the comp.os.minix newsgroup (actually I think it was "alt.os.minix" back then, but things have changed since then) to play with his code.

The Linux Project? Given the anarchy that characterizes the development of Linux its a little hard to call it a "project." In one sense Linux is "just" a kernel. The sources for that kernel are maintained by Linus -- and parts of it have been written by lots of people. In addition to the official kernel

In other senses Linux is an incarnation of the GNU project. It provided a kernel to allow the Free Software Foundation's code function as a stand alone operating system. Richard Stallman (rms) the founder of the GNU project has occasionally raised some controversy regarding this. By contrast, GNU is a project -- which a central spokesperson and an official plan and policy. It is also working on it's own kernel, called the HURD ("HIRD of Unix Replacement Daemons" where HIRD, in turn, stands for "HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth *)

While the Linux kernel is released under the GNU Public License (GPL) it is not part of the GNU project. So, although, large parts of a typical Linux distribution or installation are GNU -- it isn't quite right to say that Linux is "just" a GNU system.

It is conceivable that someone could create a complete Linux distribution using all BSD, public domain, and other non-GNU software (although it would probably still need to be built with gcc, the GNU C compiler). In fact I think there are some "X terminals" which are really a combination of the Linux Kernel and XFree86 without basically no officially GNU "products" embedded in the system. Like said, Linux is the product of concerted anarchy.

As a result of all this wonderful anarchy it's difficult to say anything definitively about the subject. I can't simply point to one place with a link that says the official Linux web site. However, here's a sampler of the sites that I think are the best overall resources for Linux: