After considering the comments of some PLUG members,
I have modified my Welcome Address a bit. So here
now is the latest, version 2.0:
PMana
==== Start file: welcome.txt ====
Linux Tenth Anniversary Celebration
Philippine Linux Users' Group
August 25, 2001
Venue: Asia Pacific College
WELCOME ADDRESS, version 2.0
Welcome to the tenth anniversary celebration of the birth
of the Linux operating system. Linux's birth was announced
August 25 ten years ago in Finland by its author Linus Torvalds,
who at that time was a computer science graduate student at the
University of Helsinki. The Philippine Linux Users' Group
is very happy to be celebrating Linux's tenth anniversary
with you today.
What is Linux? It is an "operating system" -- the software program
that manages the hardware resources of the computer, and allows
human users cooperative access to those resources. Like
the popular Windows operating system, Linux is multi-tasking --
several processes can be running at the same time -- the CPU
gives each process a time-slice in which to run. Unlike Windows,
Linux is multi-user -- several users can be logged into the
computer at the same time and each user may be running several
processes.
Linux is robust -- it does not hang. If properly maintained,
it runs reliably and faithfully, working everyday 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, year in year out without fail. It is not affected
by popular viruses like "I Love You" and "Code Red" which have
brought down thousands of Windows machines on the Internet. On the
contrary, it has been used to control the spread of such
Windowphilic viruses.
Linux is free -- you do not buy a license to use it. You download
it for free from the Internet, or copy it from a friend's CD,
and all these are legal. You are licensed to use it for free,
to study the source code and improve on it, as long as your
improvements, like the original on which it is based, are made
available in source code for free. This "freedom to study and modify
software" is a model of software development that has proved
workable over the past ten years. It guarrantees that Linux and
similar software will continue to improve and will be available
for free.
If it is so good and it is free, how come people do not use it on
their office PCs and their notebooks? I think the problem here
is inertia. People have been using Word, Excel and Powerpoint on
Windows PCs, which by the way are excellent software, that it takes
time to switch to new software like Linux. It is like having a
comfortable and working marriage to an expensive weak partner
who keeps secrets from you, when there is a beautiful robust partner
who will not hide secrets from you, waiting to be taken for free,
On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds announced that he was working
on this new operating system. On September 17, 1991 he posted
version 0.10 on ftp.funet.fi. This version hardly worked at all.
In September 1993, he released version 0.99.13 which was a fully
working Unix system with networking, which was the first version we
used at Ateneo. Back then this version felt better and friendlier
than SCO Unix 3.2. This was followed over the years by better
and more featureful Linux releases: version 1.0 in March 1994,
version 1.2 in March 1995, version 2.0 in June 1996, version 2.2
in January 1999, and version 2.4 in January 2001. The latest,
version 2.4.9 was released nine days ago. Today, the releases
are archived at the Transmeta site in California, ftp.kernel.org,
where Linus Torvalds is presently employed.
What features are in version 2.4? Thirty-two bit UIDs, allowing
up to four billion users on one system; four gigabyte addressable
memory, the maximum on 32-bit Intel PCs; 64-bit file pointers
for 18,000 terabytes (1.8x10^19) of file space; process table
entries limited only by available memory; journalizing filesystems
like reiserfs and IBM jfs -- all these make Linux a reasonable
choice for scalability for enterprise-level computing.
The availability of two families of complete graphical user
environments, GNOME and KDE, make Linux very attractive on the
desktop. Add to this the availability of Office-like applications
like StarOffice and others.
Linux has come a long way from the lowly version 0.10 to the
top of the line version 2.4.9.
So today, we of the Philippine Linux Users' Group and you our friends
celebrate the tenth anniversary of Linux. We take this occasion
to thank the people who have made Linux what it is: Linus Torvalds,
Allan Cox, and all 200 programmers(*) who currently maintain it,
Richard Stallman for gcc and emacs and GPL, and UC Berkeley,
Eric Allman, the Apache Group, Larry Wall, and all open source authors,
for believing that software should be free.
On the occasion of Linux's tenth anniversary, we welcome you
to this celebration of "freedom".
Enjoy!
/*
** Pablo Manalastas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
** President 1994?-1998?, Philippine Linux Users' Group
*/
(*) NOFMAINTAINERS=$( cat /usr/src/linux/MAINTAINERS \
| grep "P:" | sort | uniq | grep -v "Person" | wc -l )
==== End file: welcome.txt ====
_
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