EDITOR'S NOTE: Hiya, Lady Ada here to introduce this tutorial! If you're starting down the path to learning about electronics or computers, you may have noticed or heard about "Linux" - as in "this dev board is linux-based" or "this wearable runs linux" or "I wrote a linux script to control the barcode scanner"

And you might be wondering Well, what is this "Linux" anyhow? Does it matter to me?  and then maybe you asked someone and you got a long rant about stuff called kernels and bashed shells and now you're wondering if it's corn-related or is some sort of crab.

Being that this question and confusion is inevitable, and we're getting so many people asking about this mysterious Linux, we at Adafruit thought we'd write up a series of tutorials to help you understand what linux is, when you want linux and how to use it when you do.

This is the first in the series, take it away Brennen!