Preface

Many things have changed since that day in which a young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds decided to post a message in a forum searching for help with the development of a new operating system. He hardly could have imagined that there would be so many people eager to collaborate. And what it had started as a hobby became an efficient OS used today by thousands of companies and users around the World.

Linus decided to make its OS free for everybody to use, share, study and modify the code. So he licensed the code under the GNU license. This way it was possible for everybody to have access to the source code and modify it accordingly to their likes and/or needs. This ended in many companies, universities, etc.. having their own Linux distributions.

Even though many of these distributions remained confined into small areas of influence such as universities or official departments, a few of them have gained enough recognition along the years, we could mention a few well known examples, such as Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, etc…

The RedHat Linux distribution, developed by the RedHat company is, undoubtedly, one of the most important and influential. RedHat has made many relevant contributions to the Linux community, for example the RedHat packet manager (rpm) used by several other distributions, for example Suse.

RedHat used to publish desktop, as well as server editions of its OS, and these were made freely available for anyone to use. But in the year 2004 the company decided that their OS would only be provided to their clients. Obviously this concerns only the binary distributions, as the source code has to be made publicly available to comply with the GNU license.

From that moment on, two new projects emerged with the aim to try and maintain a RedHat clone which would be freely available for everyone to use. The first project was called Fedora, it was sponsored by RedHat itself and was conceived as some sort of beta RedHat platform.

Many users though that Fedora was OK as a Desktop platform, but it was by no means a reliable enterprise solution. In order to fulfill this gap, many Linux professionals and enthusiasts gathered around a new project called CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System). Whose main goal was to become a robust enterprise operating system freely available.

Today CentOS is a reliable, efficient server operating System used by hundreds of companies to provide critical services.

Audience

Some experience with computers is expected. Some previous Linux experience would be fine, even though it is not absolutely necessary. The only requirement is the will to learn things!

Conventions

Italic Used for filenames, paths and URLs.

Bold Used for commands and proper names.

Feedback

I’d really like to get your opinions, suggestions, doubts or critics regarding this book. Please, feel free to email me at antoniojvv@yahoo.es. However, I cannot promise to answer to everybody.