To transform Chrome and Gears into a lightweight operating system, Google will have replaced the rest of Linux with a slimmed down windowing and application manager that integrates with Chrome and Gears for running applications on the web and with the Linux kernel for running the computer hardware.
Mr Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel in 1991, when he was a 21-year-old computer-science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland.