[ale] academic study of PC operating systems

[Glenn C. Lasher Jr.]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Mark BennettDoy wrote:

> This is for real!!
> 
> Hello ALE,
>     I am a first year student with a major UK university and I would
> be grateful if someone could help me, As part of an assessment I have
> to examine the role of the operating system within the microcomputer,
> and compare the ways that the differing O/S operate. Obviusly I will
> have to cover the "other" major system but as I do not have any
> experience with linux I would appreciate some basic information such
> as it's history,the way its interface differs from Windows and
> anyother information you may feel is important(doesn't need to be to
> technical(please)).

> ps yours was the first site pulled up via Yahoo in the UK

Greetings, Mark, and welcome to the forum.  

Sometime in the early 90's, a collection of software for UNIX operating
systems pulled together under an organization called the Free Software
Foundataion, their products fall under the "brand" name GNU, which stands
for GNU is Not Unix (yes, it's recursive).  It contained (and still does)
an extensive collection of bits and bobs, but fell short of being an
actual O/S because there was no kernel.  You can check them out at
www.gnu.org.  Software produced under this flag is legal to be distributed
for free, provided source code is distributed with the binaries, and may
be sold, but you may not, in selling it, forbid the buyer from modifying,
copying or reselling it.  

Along came a Finnish student named Linus Torwalds (Linus, apologies if I
misspelled your last name), who created the Linux kernel, using the
"Engineering Clean Room" technique, i.e. he built a product that was an
effective clone of another product (UNIX) from the specification, thus
being able to claim full credit for the creation.  Put together with other
GNU pieces, it became a viable operating system.  You can find more about
it from www.linux.org.  

You may also wish to do a web search on "Linus Torwalds".  He is currently
employed by Transmeta Corp. in California.  They are, predictably,
www.transmeta.com.  

The interface differs from that of Windows in that the interface is
modular.  You can separate the interface from the kernel and use the
interface of your choice.  Along those lines, there are several "shells"
which interpret command lines for you, and can be used alone, or in
conjunction with a GUI.  The shells available are the same as those for
any other UNIX, sh (Bourne shell), ksh (Korn shell), csh (C shell), bash
(Bourn Again shell), etc.  The GUI's consist of the most generic to the
most exotic.  Twm, for example, is available (but who would want to use
it?!?) along with fvwm, fvwm95 (a Win95 lookalike) olvwm and olwm (clones
of the Solaris OpenWindows GUI), KDE (makes the more common CDE that you
see on commercial UNIX look like junk), Gnome (fully opensource
alternative to KDE), and others.  Some of them include active desktops,
integrated web browsers, and other miscellaneous forms of eye candy.

I strongly suggest, if you have a computer at your disposal to which you
could do this, that you get Linux and try it!  It doesn't take a lot of
horsepower like Windows, and runs satisfactorily on a '486.  Try it,
you'll like it!


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