15 years of Linux

Happy Birthday!


The Linux operating system celebrates its 15th birthday in August. Linux has established itself in the server market and has even managed to garner respect from the giant Microsoft. However, you won't find any electronics stores selling pre-installed Linux computers, and many users are still having a devil of a time trying to find Linux drivers for their hardware.

By Ulrich Bantle and Mathias Huber

vvvstep, Fotolia

In August of 1991, on a 386 computer, a 21-year old Finnish college student named Linux Torvalds wrote version 0.01 of Linux. In one of his first postings, the young Finn reported that the original Linux was a rudimentary operating system that couldn't support anything other than AT hard drives [1]. The early criticism of experts such as operating system guru Andrew Tanenbaum is now only a historical footnote [2]. As we approach the 15th birthday of Linux, Tanenbaum's Minix system has only found a niche in the narrowest circles of academia, whereas Linux is running on systems around the world.

Linux has even made the jump into the world of business. In June 2001, Microsoft heavyweight Steve Ballmer categorized the Linux operating system as the greatest of threats.

As Linux approaches its 15th birthday, the Linux/Apache duo dominates the web server landscape [3]. With the decision to install the free operating system on all city work stations, the city of Munich and other municipalities have put Linux in the headlines.

Figure 1: Lenovo delivers the ThinkPad T60p, also with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 - but unfortunately not to normal customers.

Remaining Challenges

Despite all the partial successes, Linux is still far from being a leading operating system. The average user still cannot find a desktop computer bundled with Linux in a normal electronics store. The attempts of some manufacturers to put a complete Linux computer on the market are so rare that, even in 2006, news of a Linux computer sweeps through the Linux community like wildfire. The latest example is Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer that bought IBM's notebook division made headlines with a notebook preinstalled with Suse Linux [4]. However, the sobering news is that only business customers can buy this kind of system. Private users have to provide their own operating system.

Dell also enjoyed an increase in attention as it announced a similar offer in its French shops in cooperation with the French distributor Mandriva. However, the attempt to design the system "specifically for students" was a snag.

With the release its new Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), Novell has renewed its claim that Linux is ready for wide use on desktops. At the same time, though, it appears that big Linux distributions such as Red Hat and Suse are losing their interest in desktop customers. Red Hat no longer sells boxes to end users, and Novell no longer includes any proprietary drivers, which causes problems for newbies trying to install hardware.

Ready for the Desktop

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth seems to be very serious about creating desktops for the masses. With clever marketing, a solid technical foundation based on Debian, and adequate assets in the background, he has managed to even get an unknown Linux distribution noticed by the mainstream press: even computer users who never knew anything about Linux heard about Ubuntu in 2005.

It seems the signs aren't so bad for a move to the desktop. The soothsayers predict that the new version of Windows will be delayed until the middle of 2007. Kevin Johnson, Co-President of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division, recently prophesied to analysts regarding the release date, "We will ship Windows Vista when the product is ready." Years ago, you mostly heard vague deadlines like this in relation to the notoriously delayed Debian Project.

But while Windows Vista is becoming even more delayed, the semi-annual Ubuntu releases are becoming ever more punctual. However, Ubuntu still hasn't appeared in a pre-installed Ubuntu box on the sales floor of any local computer store.

Figure 2: Piles of documentation. With the Driver Development Kit (DDK), Greg Kroah-Hartman would like to encourage the development of Linux drivers.

The Driver Question

The Linux laptops from Novell and Lenovo are not usable without special drivers. The driver problem is a real issue for Linux development. In the meantime, the variety of hardware products supported by Linux has increased enormously. Greg Kroah-Hartman emphasized this fact in his presentation at the Linux Symposium [5]. Every Linux user has, at some point, experienced the frustration of either not having the right driver or having a driver that does not work properly. Even Kroah-Hartman admitted to the driver problem indirectly by creating the Driver Development Kit [6] to promote Linux driver development.

Drivers are the point where the free Linux world and the mainly proprietary world of hardware development bump into each other.

Creating GPL drivers through reverse engineering often leads to unsatisfactory results. Equipment manufacturers like Intel cooperate voluntarily, while others only cooperate after intense lobbying.

The more hardware that runs smoothly on Linux, the better the chances that the free operating system will catch on with mainstream users. And the larger the Linux market, the more hardware manufacturers will participate in kernel development. The Linux world will have to work on this Gordian knot for the next few years.

The licensing of the Linux drivers remains a challenge: depending on how the GPL is interpreted, even loading a non-GPL module is violating the license. If you decide to leave these illegal drivers out of your Linux system, support for your hardware would leave much to be desired.

Novell, for instance, self-righteously announced [7] at the beginning of 2006 that it would henceforth ban proprietary drivers from the kernel of its distributions. However, a short time later, for practical reasons, the company had to again offer its customers a simple way of installing commercial drivers in Linux after the fact.

Desktop Dance

The decisions made by large cities such as Munich [8] and Vienna to use Linux on the desktop prove that Linux is in the process of becoming a permanent fixture in the IT landscape. Office employees go about their daily tasks with Linux systems, and even supermarket cashiers are working with Linux.

If the Open Source community and the software industry will put some serious effort into addressing existing problems such as hardware support, Linux will continue its success for the next 15 years.

INFO
[1] Linus Torvalds: What would you like to see most in minix? http://groups.google.de/group/comp.os.minix/msg/b813d52cbc5a044b
[2] Andy Tanenbaum: Linux is obsolete http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/mhonarc-files/obsolete/msg00000.html
[3] Netcraft: http://www.netcraft.com
[4] Lenovo announcement:http://www.lenovo.com/news/us/en/2006/08/t60p.html
[5] Greg Kroah-Hartman: Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux Kernel http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
[6] Driver Development Kit: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/ddk/
[7] Andreas Jäger: Suse Linux 10.1 Update http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-announce/2006-Feb/msg00003.html