So my BeagleBone stopped working this weekend… again. When I plug it into a power source the power light turns on but the user LED’s don’t light, and I can’t connect to it anymore with my PC. This happened before and re-imaging the SD card fixed the problem, but I’ve done that about five times this weekend and nothing is happening. So, until I get my BeagleBone fixed or I find a new one, I’m working on some research. Below is a short history of Linux. It’s not directly related to my project but I thought it was cool and it’s made me a lot more interested and appreciative of using Linux in an embedded micro-controller. Soon I’ll have another post about Linux in embedded systems, and why the kernel has changed recently so we have to use device trees to program GPIO pins now. For now this is all I have, enjoy, I hope it’s not too long!

A Short History of Linux

Before Linux or Windows or Embedded Systems took off there was UNIX, which began in 1969 with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in Bell Labs. There were several projects based on UNIX developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but they were expensive, so in 1991 a Finnish student in the University of Helsinki combined them all to develop a new, free (open-source) operating system kernel. His name was Linus Torvalds and he created Linux. (You can guess where the name came from!)

Note: Although it is the focal point of an operating system Torvalds’ kernel could not make up Linux on its own. He combined it with GNU programs written by an MIT graduate called Richard Stallman, and Linux was born from there.

Linux grew in popularity over the years because Torvalds looked for help and advice from the global community to build his project (and still does). Before Linux, the creators of UNIX and similar projects did not take suggestions from users to improve their designs, and this is what made Linux different. Today this is still one of Linux’ core values and they still look for feedback from their users. Between 1992 and 1994 what we know now as the Linux desktop began in the form of distros called Slackware, Debian and RedHat (the ‘big-three’) and developers all over the world started writing programs for running on Linux. By 1993 Linux had over 120000 users!

Between 1995 and 1999 more than 40 other distros or versions of the Linux OS were developed and released. As versions improved the kernel had better memory management and it could be run on more and more types of processors. New desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) were available to use by 1998 and companies such as Oracle and Sun began to support Linux, encouraging its use in server rooms. Linux was still in its ‘GURU’ stage at this time meaning it could only be installed with good computing knowledge, but by the year 2000 Knoppix was released which was the first version of Linux that could be booted straight from a CD. Unfortunately Linux still hasn’t lost this ‘GURU’ status today because not many people in the media have real experience using it.

In the year 2000 the Linux Foundation was also set up. Linux was designed to be ‘free’ to grow (which is why everyone was making their own distros for it), so it needed a group to keep it independent and remember all the ‘core values’ of freedom and education.

For the next few years Linux distros were growing at an alarming rate and getting close to becoming good alternatives to Windows, but they still weren’t as user friendly and as easy to use for people with little Linux knowledge. Because of this the Ubuntu distro was born in 2004, which is what I’ve been using on my desktop to talk to my BeagleBone (however my Ubuntu distro has been upgraded quite a lot since 2004). After Ubuntu came Linux Mint, and after that Android began, which the most popular Linux-based operating system in the world right now!

Linux is still very strong and is now used in embedded systems, which is why I’ve been reading up about it. It’s cost effective (free in fact because it’s open-source), stable, it has a very low susceptibility to viruses; it doesn’t run all the annoying updates that Windows has, and it’s highly customisable. I would recommend that everyone uses Linux at some stage (you probably already have if you have a smartphone!).