markring40 at ippimail.com wrote: > Then a sys admin for a local, South Dakota ISP gave me (years ago) his > Slackware 7.0 CD's. That is the distro that I learned the most from. It > has good documentation and it's own package utility. > http://www.slackware.com/ > > By the way, the Slackware Kernel was written by a one-time student of > Moorhead State (Patrick Volkerding), where my son starts on Monday! I think it is time for another quick primer and history: kernel: this is the core of the operating system, the most basic program that runs the hardware. This is what drivers plug into to make your whizbang hardware able to whizbang. Under Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and all other Linux distributions this kernel is called Linux. under windows it is called NTKRNL.EXE, under dos it is msdos.sys(sorta). Distribution: In the olden days Linux was a complete distribution onto itself, Linus Torvalds released it to replace minix on your computer so it included gcc, getty, bash and a kernel(no name for the kernel at the time); nowadays Linux is just the kernel and other people such as Pat Volkerding put this kernel along with many other software packages onto media to make a distributibution. Distributions usually include the software that talks to the hardware via the drivers to make the whizbang hardware actually do its whizbanging. Many of the basic application in a distribution come from a project by Richard Stallman(rms) called GNU. His idea was to make a OS to replace Unix(or minix as the case may be) the only problem was that they never got around to actually writing a kernel, last i heard they are still working on it 20 years later. If you are not confused yet, rms wants you to call every linux distribution GNU/Linux because the majority of code in a distribution was writted for GNU. I know i an opening a can of worms here but these are things that people need to know about so that they do not go around saying stuff like: the Slackware Kernel was written by Patrick Volkerding. Because that just makes you look like an idiot. I have tried to be objective in my above descriptions, but i also need to be subjective to keep my sanity. Stop reading if you do not care about my opinions. Personally i think rms needs to smoke less, if he wanted recognition he should have written it into his license; oh wait he does get get plenty enough recognition as it is because of his license(who does not know the GNU GPL?). I think he is just miffed that some 20year old Finnish college student was able to release his GNU system before he was and got all his glory, the this student did not even make it to MIT, to add insult to injury this system now is not known as GNU as it was supposed to, but linux after this upstart kid.