Summary

Software from the GNU Project has helped make Linux a complete operating system. Many components of Linux—from the Bash shell to the GNOME GUI—come from the GNU Project. This chapter provided an overview of the GNU software packages and described some of the utility programs in those packages. Other GNU software packages are covered in other parts of this book.

By reading this chapter, you learned the following things:

The GNU Project, supported by the Free Software Foundation, provided many software packages that make Linux a complete operating system. More information about the GNU Project is available online at http://www.gnu.org/.
The GNU software packages include such well-known software as the Bash shell, the GNOME GUI, the GIMP image-processing program, the gzip compression/decompression utility, the tar archiving program, the Emacs editor, and a large number of other utilities that Linux users and programmers use.