Linux is a multi-user, multi-tasking, 32-bit operating system based on the UNIX operating system developed in the 1960s. One of the main characteristics that set it apart from other operating systems such as Windows is that it is open-source, meaning that the source code comes with it and the user is able to modify, sell or redistribute it freely.But a company or an organization did not write Linux, it was written by a college student named Linus Travolds. With the help of many programmers, often called "hackers", Linux has surprised many people by being a stable, high-quality system that has little central control.
             The kernel is the heart of an operating system, and when most people refer to Linux, they are talking about the kernel and not the whole system. On a Linux system, the user is more in touch with the kernel, mainly because he/she can do whatever they want to it legally. Also, people around the world are always updating the kernel, but Travolds has the final word into what goes into each release. Linux is one of the few operating systems that have a particular kernel version number scheme. For example, a stable kernel's version can be 2.4.25. Even-numbered kernels, such as 2.2.7, are stable, while odd-numbered, such as 2.5.14, are pre-releases. The 2 is for the major release, the 4 is for the minor release leading up to the major, and the 25 is for the even smaller change leading up to the minor release. After that, there are prepatches (acknowledged with an rc after the version number) that are alpha releases. If any new development is good enough, the kernel can skip numbers, so a kernel can go from 2.2.3 to 5.0 in a few months, but it has not happened yet. As of this writing, the latest stable kernel is 2.6.3 and the latest prepatch is 2.6.4-rc2 , and contains over twenty million lines of
             code. The kernel controls hardware support, process management, and other vital functions of an operating system, and can theo...