The operating system: role and families
What an operating system does between programs and hardware, and the main families: Unix and BSD, Linux and its distributions, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS.
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- 5 topics
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Operating system: what is it?
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The base software that shares the processor, memory, files and devices between programs, and protects each one from the others.
Without it, every program would have to drive the hardware itself and could overwrite its neighbour's memory.
Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora are:
- three distributions built around the Linux kernel
- three different kernels written by separate teams
- three successive versions of one single Linux system
- three Unix-derived systems that do not use Linux at all
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three distributions built around the Linux kernel
They share the same kind of kernel; their tools, packages and update policy set them apart, not the kernel.
Android runs on the … kernel, iOS and macOS on the … kernel, Windows on the … kernel.
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Android runs on the Linux kernel, iOS and macOS on the XNU kernel, Windows on the NT kernel.
A product name hides a kernel: Ubuntu and Android share a Linux kernel but not the rest of their software.
Linux distribution: what is it?
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A ready-to-install bundle that brings together the Linux kernel, system tools, a package manager and software.
Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch share the same base kernel; they differ in their packages, defaults and update pace.
A tutorial written for Ubuntu says
sudo apt install htop. On a Fedora machine, the command answers "apt: command not found". What is the most likely cause?- Fedora uses another package manager, dnf, and not apt
- Fedora's kernel is too old to run apt
- apt is reserved for the root account, and the current account lacks that right
- The terminal is not a Bash shell, and only Bash knows apt
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Fedora uses another package manager, dnf, and not apt
The kernel is the same; what changes is the distribution's tooling. Debian and Ubuntu use apt, Fedora uses dnf. A missing right would have given a different message.