Linux Celebrates 22nd Anniversary, Final 3.11 Release Coming “Within A Week”

On Sunday, Linux celebrated the 22nd anniversary of its announcement, with Linus Torvalds leaving a special message on the Linux Google+ account.

“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,” begins the post, which pays homage to the original 1991 free OS announcement.

In the post, Torvalds reported the availability of Linux version 3.11-rc7, and promised a final 3.11 release, codenamed Linux for Workgroups, “within a week”.

Hello everybody

“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,” wrote Torvalds.

“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.”

The developer added that he doesn’t really want to get feature requests this late in the development cycle, but would be happy if people would try the release candidate.

Torvalds originally planned to release the final Linux 3.11 version on 11 August, exactly 20 years after Microsoft released Windows 3.11, otherwise known as Windows for Workgroups. However, the busy development schedule had made this impossible.

Linux version 3.11 will feature better support for AMD processors including a new Direct Rendering Manager driver, Intel Bay Trail graphics support, extended virtualisation on ARM processors and a range of power consumption and performance tweaks.

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