Introduction

Chapter 1. Introduction

On February 18,1999, Red Hat Software, Inc. announced that it had entered an alliance with IBM to deliver, via IBM Business Partners, high-performance IBM systems running Red Hat Linux.
IBM and Red Hat are working together to optimize IBM personal system hardware for running Red Hat Linux, providing customers with powerful and reliable enterprise and e-business solutions on the Red Hat Linux platform.
Developers from both companies will work to maximize performance, reliability, and security for Red Hat Linux on IBM Netfinity servers.
In addition to contributing developer expertise, Red Hat will also perform hardware certification testing.

Today more than 10 million users all over the world run the Linux operating system.
According to IDC Research, Linux was the fastest growing server operating environment in 1998, capturing more than 17% of all server operating system shipments.

In 1998 Infoworld chose Red Hat Linux as their Product of the Year in the operating system category. Red Hat Linux was chosen for its ease of use, stability and utility as a multipurpose server platform for entry and mainstream servers.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland,

developed an operating system he called Linux   and he intended to have it as a hobby.

Torvalds's hobby is what we today know as Linux and is an operating system which is developed with assistance from programmers around the world.