​You need to add >>and that he knew about and had access<<.

The truth is there was and it had networking and X windows already.  Bill Jolitz had completed the original 386 BSD port (and actually started to publish about it in DDJ).  The 386BSD sources were available to all BSD licensees - as CSRG had put them on the ucbvax ftp server (truth is they were actually available to anyone there knew how to grab it -- the attempt to keep the ftp address 'secret' was pretty shallow - not quite announced on net.noise but it certainly was passed hacker to hacker if you went to a USENIX conference in those days).​  The funny part was that Linus university was a BSD licensee and could have gotten it (although I've personally never seen or heard of evidence that they did).

So this was an example of ignorance of something, not true in fact - That said, Linus solved the problem he had.  More power to him.  Although his original kernel was a far cry from '386BSD' - but that was the point.   When the AT&T case came out, hackers like me were worried 386BSD was going to go away and started to help make Linux more complete.

I should (as Larry has pointed out) at the time of Linus original work, some institutions were far more liberal about source access than others.  So even if Linus has known about Jolitz's work, its not clear he would/could have had access to it.