Minux (sometimes spelled MINIX) is an open source operating system with a user interface similar to that of Unix. Professor Andrew Tanenbaum, of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, created Minix as an educational tool. To this end, Minix was developed with a small and well-documented microkernel-based design. The complete source code was made available with the system.
To learn the inner workings of Unix-like systems, students can run Minix on their personal computers. According to reports, even inexperienced students can acquire a good knowledge of the whole system within the few months of study typical of training courses. The best known student user of Minix was Linus Torvalds, who, at the University of Helsinki in Finland, used the Minix platform on which to build the kernel for a new operating system, which he called Linux.
This was last updated in September 2005
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