I am teaching Kali Linux 2022.1 in some colleges in Montreal. The main audience are true beginner students in different Computer Networking courses in those colleges. However, I hope this course will be beneficial to many others as well.
History
Linux has roots to Unix which was developed by AT&T. Since Unix owned by AT&T, it was not free and computer scientists (in universities) had to pay license fees. Users also were restricted by the terms of the license. Linus Torvalds started a project to develop a Unix-like operating system to do his jobs at home. He will then made it publicly available under GNU Public Licensing (GPL) guidelines. GPL allows the free distribution of software and grants the users the ability to modify the code if source code of the modification is made publicly available.
Operating System
Shell, Kernel, Hardware
In order to people use their hardware (such as their smartwatches, smartphones, laptops, tablets, IoT devices, etc.), they need a User Interface (Shell) to interact with. But the User Interface itself cannot talk to the hardware. Kernel does this job for us. Kernel communicates between the hardware and software of a computing system. It also manages how hardware resources are allocated to meet the software requirements.
Shell comes into two main interfaces:
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
A GUI is a user friendly interface which allows the user to interact with the system using graphical icons, menus, panels, widgets, dashboards, and windows. Examples of the GUI are: Windows, MacOS, Linux KDE Plasma, Linux GNOME Shell, Apple iOS, and Android.
Command-Line Interface (CLI)
CLI-bases enable users to use a keyboard to enter text-based commands, run CLI-based programs, and view output on a monitor
The Origin of GNU/Linux
The driver was to give the users freedom of what they want to do with the use of their computers.
GNU project announced by Richard Stallman in 1984. It includes shell, coreutils, compilers, libraries, etc.
Linux Kernel is an open-source Unix-like operating system kernel originally developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991.
As an analogy, when you go to Subway, you order the Sandwich bread then you add the toppings. In this analogy, Richard Stallman had the toppings and Linus Torvalds had the bread. In 1992, for the first time it was possible to have sandwich of libre bread and toppings. (free toppings and bread is a matter of liberty, not price. It means that you can chose whatever topping you want and resell it or make profit from the sandwich).
How Richard Stallman Started the GNU project
Linus Torvalds, the mind behind Linux
Linux Distributions
Being free and open source you can now modify the GNU/Linux to cater to your needs. When you make the new Operating System publicly available, you have made a distribution of GNU/Linux.
Here are the list of different GNU/Linux distribution and their history and architecture.
For the purpose of network engineering and information security we take Kali Linux and we work on that distribution.
