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one of the most widely ported operating systems in the world is Linux.
But is Linux ready for all home computer users? Linux is best installed only if you have some nontrivial computer or programming experience, or if you have a generous neighbor or relative who does.
who can argue with free?
Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, as the son of journalists Anna and Nils, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 6%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although he prefers to claim he was named after Linus from the Peanuts comic strip. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s.
Linus Torvalds received his master's degree from the University of Helsinki for the thesis "Linux: A Portable Operating System."
Linus is married to Tove Torvalds (nee Monni). She is a six-time Finnish national Karate champion, whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Linus was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendants to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date. They have three daughters, Patricia Miranda (born December 5, 1996), Daniela Yolanda (born April 16, 1998) and Celeste Amanda (born November 20, 2000), and a cat named Randi (short for Mithrandir, the Sindarin name for Gandalf, a wizard in The Lord of the Rings).
Torvalds moved to San Jose, California and lived there for several years with his family. In June of 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon. Finally, they moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to Linus's place of work.
He worked for Transmeta Corporation from February 1997 until June 2003, and is now seconded to the Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Oregon based software consortium.
His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of Linux.
