You will prepare and submit a term paper on Linux Server Environment. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. Linux is a POSIX compliant Unix-like operating system that is under the GNU General Public License. Development of Linux started when Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project, wanted to create a UNIX compatible software composed entirely of free software. By the early 1990s most of the libraries and programs required to form the Operating system were complete but low-level components like daemons, device drivers and the kernel were stalled. In 1991, frustrated by the licensing of MINIX, Linus Torvalds a student at the University of Helsinki began to work on a kernel that eventually became the Linux Kernel. From inception, Linux was an open source project and over the years it has grown to become one of the most successful open source software collaborations (Thomas, 2005).

Setting up a Linux powered server usually involves setting up LAMP. LAMP is an abbreviation of Linux, Apache, MYSQL and three CGI scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. It is the most widely used solution stack. Linux is used to provide an execution environment, Apache is the web server that serves web pages in response to user requests, and MYSQL provides persistent storage for web apps while one of the three scripting languages ensures that the pages served by the Apache web server are dynamic (Mookhey & Burghate, 2005).

Apache, formally referred to as Apache HTTP Server, is a web server application developed and maintained by an open community of developers with the help, support and protection from the apache Software foundation. Apache played a key role in the initial growth of the web. Initially developed in 1995 as a replacement for NCSA HTTPd, Apache grew in popularity to become the first web server running more that 100 million websites. Its popularity continues to grow and currently, it is estimated to serve more than 53.3% of all active websites (Eckert & Novell, 2006).

MSQL is a relational database management system commonly used to store data for web applications.