Some basic stuff about operating systems

Xlife column for Octomber 12, 2001:

Summary:
Learn what is Unix, Linux, an operating system and what drivers do.

1 What is UNIX?
2 What is Linux?
3 What is an operating system?
4 What are drivers?

1 What is UNIX?

It's an operating system. Other operating systems you may have heard of are Windows, Linux, MacOS, BeOS, Amiga or MS-DOS (in no particular order).

2 What is Linux?

It's an Unix-like operating system, because it shares some basic characteristics with it and it is derivated from it. There's a lot of increasing fuss about Linux because it was the first Unix OS for the people, that is, completely free, open-source, yet powerful and stable.

3 What is an operating system?

You can slap together pieces of hardware and (compatibility issues aside) you got yourself a computer. But you need something to make it "think", it needs software, it needs programs.

Besides the main thing they do, all programs need to know how to use the hardware so they can work with the printer, the display, the hard-drive and so on. If you'd teach all programs how to do this you'd get very large programs which all come accross the same issues over and over: how to use the same kinds of hardware.

So, some smart folks thought of this: when you turn the computer on, it loads a bunch of programs (usually from the hard-drive, but they can be on a floppy disk or a CD) which make up the operating system. Their job is to mantain a bridge between the hardware and the regular programs, a bridge which never changes on the regular programs' side and adapts itself to the changes in hardware. This way, the rest of the programs can get on doing their job without having to worry about it no more.

4 What are drivers?

It's not easy for the operating system to keep track of all existent kinds of hardware. So the smart guys took the OS adaptability one step farther: each separate hardware issue is handled by a small dedicated program of its own, called a driver. The main operating system (sometimes called the core, or the kernel) only has to worry about loading the appropriate drivers and managing them. When a manufacturer releases a new piece of hardware, they also write the drivers that will make it work best on the most popular operating systems.

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