Linux (pronunciation: IPA: /ˈlɪnʊks/, lin-uks) is a Unix-like computer operating system. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone[1].
The Linux kernel was first released to the public on 17 September 1991, for the Intel x86 PC architecture. The kernel was augmented with system utilities and libraries from the GNU project to create a usable operating system, which later led to an alternate term, GNU/Linux.[2] Linux is now packaged for different uses in Linux distributions, which contain the sometimes modified kernel along with a variety of other software packages tailored to different requirements.
Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux is supported by corporations such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, supercomputers,[3] video game systems such as PlayStation 2 and 3 and embedded devices such as mobile phones and routers.
Linux can be a wonderful OS. It is easily useable by just using the graphical interface, however if you really want to know it, learn the command line. It will allow you to have much more control on your computer than you would have without knowing it.
Linux is able to be customized to utilize just about any interface you like. Linux is NOT perfectly easy, and some distributions of it are easier than others. On this page, I have included links to the ones I tend to use the most.
CentOS - This is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, open-source edition. It matches it perfectly, and programs you would use with one can be used with the other. This is my first choice of distro, particularly if I want a server.
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the UNIX derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s.
Historically, BSD has been considered as a branch of UNIX — 'BSD UNIX', because it had shared the initial codebase and design with the original UNIX by AT&T and collaborated on the development in the pioneer days of UNIX. It was widely identified with the versions of UNIX available for workstation-class systems, that can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. The familiarity often came from using similar systems — notably DEC's ULTRIX and Sun Microsystems SunOS — during their education. Though BSD itself was largely superseded by the System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code), the modified codebase as open source — mostly derived from 4.4BSD-Lite have seen increasing use and development recently.
Today, the term of "BSD" is often non-specifically used to refer to any of the BSD descendants, e.g. FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, which forms a branch of Unix-like operating systems.