Monday, April 27, 2020

Embedded Systems to Embedded Linux

Linux has been quite a phenomenon. From its inception in the early 1990s by then student, Linus Torvalds, who would have guessed it would become the force to reckon with for operating system choices. In the beginning, it was a rough road trying to install Linux and getting it to work with almost any hardware. The kernels would crash shortly after booting, and finding device drivers that worked was almost impossible.

Linux was touch and go for the first 10 years. A small group of developers were working feverishly to make the operating system commercial grade. The distributions available then were Slackware and Debian, two distributions that had a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind them.

Slackware was actually a closed source distribution with one sole architect. Releases were sparse, and long periods of time would pass between updates.

Debian, on the other hand, has always been the default GNU Linux, and it was tough to find large numbers of volunteers who would work and stay on the project.

But Linux had something going for it that most commercial operating systems didn’t – it was open source, and a developer could modify the system as a custom operating system, only promising that the changes and improvements would be uploaded to improve its integrity, and share the source code to those changes with anyone who wanted to use Linux. And while it took some years, eventually the idea caught on, and Linux took off like a wildfire.
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