Linux Operating System (graduate level CIS term paper)

1. What Is Linux? Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The current full-featured version is 2.4 (…

…As a basis, we are currently using the ELKS distribution, due to its small size. We will migrate to BlueCat Linux from LynuxWorks, and add real-time features as required. Custom device drivers will address the unique aspects of the spacecraft architecture. Future versions will be ported to the architectures described in our Target Architecture Report. At the moment, we have not posted any downloadable code, due to issues of export restrictions on satellite control software.