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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Coffee with Linux #1 - Head Start

Introduction 

It is often a gigantic task for a newbie to grasp concepts of Linux, not because they seem nerdy but mostly because there are way too many facets to the OS and it is surrounded by a humongous number of other terms which usually tend to scare away a learner in the first glimpse. Most of the time, beginners find it hard to find a starting point to learn Linux. 

Coffee with Linux will be a series of blog posts which will touch base concepts at a very superficial level. The blogposts in this series will usually be the gateways for you to enter into the world of Linux. The series will eventually run into posts that will describe the usage of commands from terminal. The learning will not be in bookish order, it will rather be in the order of the things I learnt/learn/will learn. So let's get started!


Li'l history

Unix was an operating system started as an academic project, pioneered by the likes of  Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, at AT&T's Bell labs during the late 1960s. It gained popularity and different communities and groups were picking up unix and developing their own versions of Unix.  One such version was Minix which was supposedly a minimal Unix version, which was written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Minix was used in universities to teach computer science. Linus Torvalds picked it up, contributed to the development of an open source Kernel and called it Linux. 


Distros

As Linux is open sourced, anyone can pick up the source code and develop a version of his own. Thousands of distributions have emerged since the last couple of decades. To name a few, Redhat, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Bodhi Linux and TinyCore are some known distros. To know about the different distros of linux, visit  http://distrowatch.com 


Understanding the OS

An operating system typical has three layers. 


Environment (The Top Layer)
This layer in very raw terms deals with applications that interact with the user. Terms like KDE, GNOME and UBUNTU's UNITY fit in here. They are typically the desktop environments and Linux gives the user complete flexibility to use any of these desktop environments. If need be, the user can even chuck out this desktop environment layer and stick to the default command line interface. 

Example to Ring a bell : Desktop themes, icons, toolbars, etc.


Kernel (The Middle Layer)


Kernel is an abstraction layer that co-ordinates the applications with a system's hardware and resources. An operating system exists only because of its kernel which usually takes care of all the OS specific operations like process, memory and device management. It is completely 
written in C and can be downloaded at  http://kernel.org/

Example to Ring a bell : Running two or more applications at a time and multitasking on them.


System Resources (The Lower Layer)


File System, memory and all hardware specific physical matter come under this layer. 

Example to Ring a bell : The presence of a graphic card to play high end games. 



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