Skip to main content

How exactly is Linux different from Windows ?

Like most kids of my age, the first computer I was introduced to ran the Windows operating system.
Then, by the time I entered college, I got to know of Linux. Specifically, Ubuntu - one of the many Linux "distributions". 
While this introduced me to a whole new world of fancy names and commands,  I have increasingly felt that whatever I do it Linux can also be done in Windows, and also just as easily. That is for me Linux has been just another operating system. So I wonder - Why the buzz about it ? Agreed that, unlike Windows, I can legally use it without paying a penny. More than that, is there any "technical" difference ?

My plan is to explore this along with my friend - Arun - this summer. I want to get a clearer picture of what Linux and Windows is all about !!

I realize that there are many who are confused like me. Quite frankly, the confusion is partly because there is so much of diversity in the open source world as opposed to Windows. To give a flavour, till Richard Stallman visited my college and talked about how the familiar Linux is actually "GNU/Linux" I was contended with calling anything other than Windows as Linux ! According to him in the "gnoo slash linux" system, its only the "kernel" that Mr. Linus Torvalds contributed and the rest is from GNU. 
See, suddenly I am having to contest with so much of historical background and technical details ! The open source world is indeed complicated to understand. (By the way, "open source" and "free software" are technically different. Please ask Mr. Stallman for more details.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jump start into Character Recognition - Part 1

Motivation The dawn of computers and their integration into a huge network called the internet has accelerated the sharing of knowledge like never before. However, there exists a divide between the forms of expression familiar to us and the forms in which the information can be fed in at a computer terminal. For example, when writing about scientific material we make extensive use of diagrams to convey the ideas, but, feeding a graphic into the computer, requires special effort and doesn't come naturally. These and other aspects have always been a matter of concern for me, being someone fond of publishing on the web whatever I know :) Any how, the aim of this article and other in this series is not to demonstrate my solution to the above problem ... instead to attract young and curious minds to the problem so that they may contribute to it solution. Start The plan is to build, step by step, a very simple, character recognition program which would take a simple text file contai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Learning assembly is easy

More than a year ago, in the fourth semester of my engineering studies I was formally introduced to the assembly level programming of the Intel 8086. However, to test my programs I got a special software package installed on my PC. The extra piece of software was justified as there was the need for an emulator - something that mimics the 8086 on anybody's computer. But the question remained ... when am I going to write an assembly program that I can directly run on my own processor and not on an emulator. Now, after a while and having rediscovered my interest for assembly I have finally figured out that it is extremely easy using gcc on my Linux terminal - Write the assembly code and save to a test file with the extension .s. Next on the terminal $ gcc test.s $ ./a.out Done !! Here is a wonderful tutorial http://linuxgazette.net/issue94/ramankutty.html
Post a Comment
Read more