It was 22 years ago on Sunday that Linus Torvalds announced in a newsgroup posting that he was creating a free operating system, a message he echoed in his announcement Sunday of the latest Linux kernel release candidate.
"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," Torvalds wrote on August 26, 1991, asking people to send in feature requests.
On Sunday, Torvalds announced the Linux 3.11-rc7 kernel release in similar fashion.
"Hello everybody out there using Linux -- I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, even if it's big and professional) for 486+ AT clones and just about anything else out there under the sun. This has been brewing since april 1991, and is still not ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in Linux 3.11-rc7," he wrote on Google+.
"I originally ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), but others have taken over user space and things still seem to work. This implies that I'll get the final 3.11 release within a week, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)," he added.
Torvalds was also quick to add, in a comment on his post, that any feature requests would be a bit late. "Yeah, I don't really want to get feature requests this late in the rc series... But it is 22 years today since that email, and I would like people to try the current 3.11-rc7 kernel I just cut and uploaded to the usual places," he wrote.
Version 3.11 of the Linux kernel has been given the codename Linux for Workgroups, a reference to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, released by Microsoft a little over 20 years ago.
One of the bigger changes from version 3.10 of the kernel is improved power management in AMD Radeon graphic chips.
Loek is Amsterdam Correspondent and covers online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers@idg.com
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