1. Introduction

1.1 Purpose

The Linux User Group HOWTO is intended to serve as a guide to founding, maintaining, and growing a GNU/Linux user group.

GNU/Linux is a freely-distributable implementation of Unix for personal computers, servers, workstations, PDAs, and embedded systems. It was developed on the i386 and now supports a huge range of processors from tiny to colossal:

Note: The following supported-platforms list is not serious documentation. The point is merely to illustrate the breadth of Linux's reach. If seriously interested in the subject of Linux ports, please see also Xose Vazquez Perez's Linux ports page and Jerome Pinot's Linux architectures list (static mirrors, as both pages vanished in 2005), if only because hardware support is more complex than just generic CPU functionality, encompassing support for myriad bus variations and other subtle hardware issues (especially for Linux PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router ports).

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM7TDMI, ARM720T, and ARM920T, including Sigma Designs DVD systems using ARM cores)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • FreeScale MC68EN302
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181")
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 ( SuperH)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
  • Xilinx PetaLinux (formerly SoftBlaze, formerly Microblaze) soft processor implemented on Xilinx FPGAs
• Intel 8086 / 80286.
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX, 486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Elan, K5, K6/K6-II/K6-III), Cyrix (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX, 486DLC/DLC2/DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Cyrix III), IDT (Winchip, Winchip 2, Winchip 2A/3), IBM (486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2), NexGen (Nx586), Transmeta (Crusoe), TI (486DLC/DLC2), UMC (486SX-S, U5D/U5S), VIA (C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", C3-2 "Nehemiah"), and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian, Itanium, Itanium2/McKinley
• x86-64 family including AMD Hammer/Opteron/K8/Athlon64/Turion/Phenom/Phenom II/FX/Fusion and Intel Prescott/Nocona/Potomac, Core, Atom, Nehalem, Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000, iSeries, pSeries, PowerMac G5).
• MIPS: most SGI, Cobalt Qube, DECStation, Sony PlayStation2, and many others
• DEC Alpha
• HP PA-RISC
• SPARC International SPARC32 / SPARC64
• Digital VAX minicomputers and MicroVAXen
• Mainframes: IBM S/390 models G5 and G6 / zSeries models z800, z890, z900, and z990 and Fujitsu AP1000+ (SuperSPARC cluster)

Note that some items listed were probably one-time forks, little or not at all maintained since creation. On some of the rarer architectures, NetBSD may be more practical. (The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port should also be solid enough to serve as a compromise option, furnishing GNU/Linux userspace code on the high performance / high stability FreeBSD kernel, and OpenIndiana or another Illumos distribution can provide something similar on the OpenSolaris kernel.)

1.2 Other sources of information

If you want to learn more, the Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start.

For general information about computer user groups, please see the Association of PC Users Groups.