Linux can bring your old PC or Mac back to life -- for free
Have you heard of Linux? It's a version of Unix developed by a Finn, Linus Torvalds. But what is Unix? It's a computer operating system developed by Bell Labs in the 1960s. What was Bell Labs? It was the research arm of Bell Telephone Co.
Unix lives on and we all use it just about every day. Every time we insert a dot (a period) inside something we type on the computer, like a .com, .org, or .gov, it is a Unix command to go to that location in its memory banks and find what came before the dot. Unix ran the big mainframe computers that used to fill large rooms; they had to be specially air-conditioned because of the heat generated by these huge machines. Torvald wanted a similar, free version of the system, so he rewrote it. A co-worker named it Linux, and the name stuck despite Torvalds' objection on grounds that it sounded egotistical.
Linux can run on just about anything. Got an old PC or Mac gathering dust at the back of the closet? You can load Linux into it and it will live again. It's relatively trouble-free and comes in 20 flavors, each with a slightly different look. The most common is called Ubuntu, the latest flavor of which is named after a cat in Madagascar. But a reader wrote to say that he favors Linux Mint because it's similar to the Mac operating system. He installs it for schools and nonprofit organizations for $5 per machine.
You can run Linux and keep your old operating system at the same time in one of two ways: Create a partition on your Windows PC and get an option to start up in either Windows or Linux. Linux will usually set this up automatically. The other way is to load Linux on a thumb drive and plug it in.
(Ed: Really not accurate in a lot of places, but there we have it...)
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