The Name

At first Torvalds used "Freax" as the name for Linux. A portmanteau from "freek", "free" and "x" an allusion to Unix. But later he uploaded his file to a ftp server at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, the person who was responsible for the servers thought that "Freax" was not a very good name and he him self renamed the project as "Linux" with out the knowledge of Torvalds. But at first Torvalds protested but later he also accepted the renaming and it became generally accepted all over the world.

Lets look at the history of Linux

Actually before Linux came to planet earth there was another kernel called Unix and this was implemented in the 1960s and first released in 1970s. This was freely available and also because of it's portability Unix became a hit in the world of IT. Then after a while Unix became commercialized and was not free. So a person by the name of Richard Stallman created a project called GNU in 1983 to provide an Unix like operating system for free under GPL(General Public License). By the year 1990 everything was ready to created a full operating system but there was a problem the GNU kernel code named Hurd had failed to attract the interest of developers and was little unstable. And there was several other release from different creators but they also had smiler problems.

This led to a project in 1991 that began in Hesinki by Linus Torvalds that later became the Linux kernel. At beginning it was a terminal emulator that was used by Torvalds to access Unix servers. After a while Torvalds noticed that he has written an operating system kernel and on 25th of August 1991 he announced this to newsgroup "comp.os.minix" through Usenet. And later this became the famous Linux that we now today.

What is Linux really?

I'm going to start from the place where I left of in my first article. As you can remember I asked you a question is Linux a operating system or a kernel ?. Well most of them answered as it's an O/S but Linux is not a O/S, actually Linux is a kernel that have been gift raped with lot of free and good software's so normal people like you & me could work with in our home computer. OK, before I move on I like to give you a small idea about what is a kernel, So lets start.

What Is a Kernel?

Let me explain it like this, all mammals have a thing called the brain. By using the brain we process things what our other sensors take in and decides what to do with it. Lets presume that no had a brain what will happen? there want be any civilization. Just like that the kernel is the brain behind those big graphics and user interfaces. What kernel does actually it makes everything happen in a computer and this illustration will make it much more clear to you how the kernel works. I think now you might have little idea about what is a kernel and how it acts in the operating system.
(image is from Wikipedia)

information contained in this article was taken from Wikipedia.org