Summary

The GNU Project, now sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, was founded in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman.

In 1992, a free kernel was developed by Linus Torvalds, a computer science student at the University of Helsinki. The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License, or GPL.

Linux is a free, open source operating system. For the most part, anybody may download and install Linux free of cost.

There are many distros (types, flavors, variations) available. One can use a virtual machine or Live CD to set up a temporary system to use in the course.

Some prominent distros:

Command Line Interface (CLI) advantages

CLI commands

Paths represent locations of files. There are absolute paths, given from the root directory, and relative paths, given from the current location.

Man pages are manuals for commands and other important parts of the system.