Some Open Source Operating Systems
Created | Updated Apr 26, 2004
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Anyone reading this who is confused, it helps to understand the history and structure of *nix.
| There was a need for a structure to load and unload software on the new and fast computers. A group of engineers has been dedicated to this task by AT&T. Very important is the philosophy of small, modular, reusable tools which is also embodied in a lot of open source programs. | |||||||||||||
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| As a professor on the university Linus Thorvalds was unsatisfied with the situation. He could give his students a version of Mimix to use on their own systems but this was a very limited system. He decided to write a kernel of his own. By writing this very piece of software under the GNU licence he opened the floodgates of the 'copy happy' internet community. | |||||||||||||
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What is an Operating System?
In very, very brief an Operating System is the software part of a mechanism enabling computer hardware to start and stop specific tasks. The Operating System remains in control no matter how stupid the application performs.
(
This 'definition' excludes some commercial products from being an Operating System!
)
The Operating System controls the internal affairs such as:
Processor Utilisation
What application is granted some processor cycles.
Keeping applications seperated, they are not allowed to interfere.
Memory Usage
Each application is granted its own memory.
If required, Shared Memory is available for more then one program running at the same system.
Hardware Control
The operating system provides all the basic control tasks to use any hardware attached to the system.
Most hardware drivers come in Modules. In the current kernels these are loaded on demand. It is still possible to build your own monolytic kernel with just only the drivers linked in as needed for specific hardware.
All hardware is masked to perform just the tasks it is able to, in a manner transparent over hardware platforms and devices. (The keyboard provides a stream of characters to the application, running on an Alpha, Motorola, Intel -PC or Cellular phone.)
One little disadvantage of Open Source is most hardware factories do not give sufficient data to the public domain. This slows down the implementation of very new hardware as the drivers will have to grow by trial and error. If however a driver works, it outperforms most originals!
Security
Some tasks can be performed by all users, some are limited. (Only the super user can alter basic system properties.)
This is really just very, very brief!
GNU is the Glue between most of the Open Source Operating Systems. It is a collection of Open Source Software with the GPL licence. This allows GNU software to be used on nearly all platforms.
Both Linux and BSD have children, and those are the "distros" or distributions.
A 'distro' is a collection of a kernel, drivers and applications that work well together. Most of these 'distros' work straight out of the box. You just have to select some basic system requirements to get them customised for what you want to use it for.
More advanced users will be able to recompile the kernel to fit the exact hardware configuration, but this is not a necessity with the current modular kernels.
The oldest children are Slackware, Red Hat and Debian for Linux and FreeBSD and OpenBSD for BSD. In turn each of the major distributions has children of its own.
For more Linux distributions visit
DistroWatch.
The list is ever expanding
For all these Operating Systems with open source one has to concider:
Unlike wholesomely proprietary and closed-source Operating Systems, the user can adapt their Operating System exactly to their own specification.
Note that nobody says anything about easy, the system operator should have knowledge of all configurable parts in the first place. If you manage to get the system running the real work just starts. Nothing is perfect, even default configurations will never match your optimal settings.
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