Back in August of 1991, a student from Finland began a post to the comp.os.minix newsgroup with the words:
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
The student was Linus Torvalds, and the "hobby" he spoke of eventually became what we know today as Linux.
A full-featured POSIX-like operating system, Linux has been developed not just by Linus, but by hundreds of programmers around the world.
This massive, world-wide development effort is largely uncoordinated. Sure, Linus calls the shots where the kernel is concerned, but Linux is more than just the kernel. There's no management infrastructure; a student in Russia gets a new motherboard, and writes a driver to support a neat feature the motherboard has. A system administrator in Maryland needs backup software, writes it, and gives it away to anyone that needs it. The right things just seem to happen at the right time.
And Linux can be obtained for absolutely no money. That's right: Most of the software is available (at no charge) to anyone with the time and inclination to download it. But not everyone has that much time…
Enter a group of programmers based in North Carolina. Their goal was to make it easier for people to give Linux a try. Like many other such groups, their approach was to bundle all the necessary bits and pieces into a cohesive distribution, relieving "newbies" from some of the more esoteric aspects of bootstrapping a new operating system on their PCs.
However, unlike other distributions, this one was fundamentally different. The difference? Instead of being a snapshot of a hard disk that had a working copy of Linux on it, or a set of diskettes from which different parts of the operating system could be dumped, this distribution was based on packages.
Software development in the Linux world is fast-paced, so new versions of old software come out continually. With other distributions, upgrading software was painful -- a complete upgrade usually meant deleting everything on your hard drive and starting over.
Each package provided a different piece of software, fully tested, configured, and ready to run. Want to try a new editor? Download the package and install it. In seconds, you can give it a try. Don't like it? Issue a single command, and the package is removed.
If that was all there was to it, this distribution would be pretty nifty. But being package-based meant there was one additional advantage:
This Linux distribution could be easily upgraded.
By now you've probably guessed that the group of programmers in North Carolina is Red Hat, and the package-based distribution is Red Hat Linux.
Since Red Hat Linux's introduction in the summer of 1994, Linux and Red Hat have grown by leaps and bounds. Much has changed; support for more esoteric hardware, huge increases in reliability, and the growing use of Linux by companies around the world.
But much still remains the same. Linux is still developed by people world-wide; Linus is still involved. Red Hat is still headquartered in North Carolina; still trying to make Linux easier for people to use.
And Red Hat Linux is still package-based; always has been, always will be.
Since the release of version 4.0, Red Hat Linux runs on three leading computing platforms: Intel compatible PCs, Digital Alpha computers, and Sun SPARC equipment. Our unified source tree and the benefits of RPM (RPM Package Management) technology enable us to deploy Red Hat Linux for each platform with a minimum of effort. This, in turn, enables our users to manage and port software between these platforms as easily as possible.
We make Red Hat Linux available by unrestricted FTP from our site and many mirror sites on the Internet. Red Hat Linux is also available on CD-ROM. For current information on our product offerings and links to other Linux resources please check Red Hat's website at http://www.redhat.com.
On most systems, Red Hat Linux is easy to install; the installation program can walk you through the process in as little as 15 minutes. The system itself is very flexible. With RPM, you can install and uninstall individual software packages with minimal effort.
Because of RPM, Red Hat Linux is also easy to maintain -- package installations can be verified and corrected, and packages can be installed and uninstalled simply and reliably. Furthermore, Red Hat Linux is easy to administer. Included are a rich set of administrative tools which reduce the hassle of everyday system administration. Complete source code is provided for the freely distributable components of the system.