Following requests from a number of members, Phillip Marsden gave us a beginner’s guide to the Linux operating system. Freely available from the internet for platforms including ARM and Intel’s x86, Linux is growing in popularity and Phillip explained what it was and why we might want to use it instead of one of the commercially available operating systems. He then examined some of the vast quantity of software that is also freely available for the platform, before closing by discussing some of the different distributions available and how to install one on an existing Windows machine.