SEMINAR REPORT

ON

LINUX

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of

the degree of Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from University of Jammu

by

Ayush Bhat (GCET/157/13)

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

GOVERNMENT COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, JAMMU

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 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the seminar report titled Linux has been successfully completed in
partial fulfillment of the award of Bachelor of Engineering in Computer from University of
Jammu by Ayush Bhat (GCET/157/2013)

HOD

___________________________

Dr. Simmi Dutta

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

GOVERNMENT COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, JAMMU

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who provided me the necessary
support, motivation and guidance to complete the seminar report. A very special thanks to
my family for never ending support. I also extend my wholehearted appreciation to all my
teachers for supporting me and for being a constant source of guidance and inspiration.

_____________________
Ayush Bhat

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

GOVERNMENT COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, JAMMU

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 ABSTRACT

The Linux operating system occupies a special position in the world of computer science.
Unlike the great majority of operating systems, which are produced by commercial
developers and sold at a profit, Linux is produced and maintained by a coterie of enthusiastic
volunteers, and is distributed with no license fees whatsoever. It is available in several
versions that run with nearly identical look and feel on a diverse group of hardware platforms.
Linux is famed both for its stability and for its efficiency, often running for months, or
occasionally years at a time without having to be rebooted, while also achieving excellent
performance. It conveys many of the properties of UNIX that have made that operating
system extremely popular among computer science professionals. Linux source code is as
freely available as the executable code, thus giving users complete freedom to modify and
adapt the operating system to the special needs of their systems. Linux maintains the
tradition of openness and voluntarism that originally characterized the UNIX world, while at
the same time avoiding the concomitant fragmentation experienced by UNIX into a variety of
dialects. Linux is likely to continue to increase in importance.

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 Contents

Introduction to Operating System.

Linux Components.

Forget about viruses.

No Restart Needed.

No Need Of Drivers.

Linux Protects your Computer.

Workspaces

No more Crapware

Freedom.

Conclusion.

REFERENCES.

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 INTRODUCTION

An Operating System is a program that acts as an Intermediary between the user of a

computer and the computer hardware. The purpose of an operating system is to provide an
environment in which a user can execute programs in a convenient and efficient manner. An
Operating System is a program that manages the computer hardware. It also provides a basis
for application programs. An Operating System is an important part of almost every computer
system. An amazing aspect of operating system is how varied it is useful in accomplishing the
tasks. Mainframe Operating System are designed primarily to optimize utilization of
hardware. Personal Operating System Support complex games, business applications and
everything in Between. Hand-held computer Operating System are designed to provide an
environment in which a user can easily interface with computer to execute programs.

Compiler Assembler Text Editor

System and application programs

Operating System

Computer Hardware

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 LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM
LINUX is modern , free operating system based on UNIX standards. It has been designed to
run efficiently and reliably on common PC hardware, it run also on a variety of other
platforms. It provides a programming interface and user interface compatible with standard
UNIX systems. A Complete Linux system includes many Components that were independently
of Linux. The core Linux operating-system Kernel is entirely original, But it allows much
existing free UNIX software to run, resulting in an entire UNIX-compatible operating system
free from proprietary code. The Linux kernel is implemented as a traditional monolithic kernel
for performance reasons, but it is modular enough in design to allow most drivers to be
dynamically loaded and unloaded at a run time. Linux is a multi-user system ,providing
protection between processes and running multiple processes according to a time-sharing
scheduler.
Inter-process communication is supported for message queues ,semaphores and shared
memory and BSDs socket interface. Multiple networking protocols can be accessed
simultaneously through the socket interface. To the user, the file system appears as a
hierarchical Directory tree that obeys UNIX semantics. Linux uses an abstraction layer to
manage multiple different file system. Device-oriented network and virtual file systems are
supported. Device-oriented file-systems access disk storage through two caches. The memory
management system uses page sharing and copy-on-write to minimize the duplication of data
shared by different processes. Pages are loaded on demand when they are first referenced,
and are paged back out to backing store according to an LFU algorithm if physical memory
needs to be reclaimed.

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 LINUX COMPONENTS
The Linux System is composed of three main bodies of code
Kernel
System Libraries
System Utilities
KERNEL:- The Kernel is responsible for maintaining all the important abstractions of the
Operating System.
SYSTEM LIBRARIES :- The System Libraries define a set of Standard set of functions through
which applications can interact with kernel and that implement much of the operating system
Functionality that does not need the full privileges of kernel code.
SYSTEM UTILITIES :- The System Utilities are programs that Perform individual, specialized
management tasks,including Virtual Memory and processes.

System User User Compilers

Management Processes Utility
Programs Programs

System Shared Libraries

Linux Kernel

Loadable Kernel Modules

The Linux Kernel forms the core of the Linux Operating System. It provides all the functionality
necessary to run processes and it provides system services to give arbitrated and protected
access to the hardware resources . The System Libraries provide many types of functionality
. At the simplest level, they allow applications to make kernel system service requests. Making
a system call involves transferring control from unprivileged user mode to privileged Kernel
mode. The System Libraries may also provide more complex versions of the basic system calls.
The libraries provide routines that do not correspond to system calls at all, such as sorting
algorithms ,mathematical functions and string manipulation routines. The Linux System
includes a wide variety of user-mode programs- boot System utilities and User utilities. The
System utilities include all the programs necessary to initialize the system, to load kernel
modules.

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 Forget about viruses.

If your computer shuts itself down without asking you, if strange windows with text you don't
understand and all kinds of advertisements appear when you don't ask for them, if emails get
sent to all your contacts without your knowing it, then your computer probably has a virus.
The main reason for this is because it runs Windows.

Linux hardly has any viruses. And that's not like "Oh well, not very often, you know". That's
like "If you've ever heard of a real Linux virus, please tell me". Of course, a Linux virus is not
impossible to get. However, Linux makes it very hard for this to happen, for several reasons:

Most people use Microsoft Windows, and pirates want to do as much damage (or
control) as possible: therefore, they target Windows. But that's not the only reason;
the Apache web server (a web server is a program located on a remote computer that
sends web pages to your browser when you ask for them), which is open source
software, has the biggest market share (against Microsoft's IIS server), but it still
suffers from much fewer attacks/flaws than the Microsoft one.
Linux uses smart authorization management. In Windows you (and any program you
install) usually have the right to do pretty much anything to the system. If you feel like
punishing your PC because it just let your precious work disappear, you can go inside
the system folder and delete whatever you want: Windows won't complain. Of course,
the next time you reboot, trouble begins. But imagine that if you can delete this
system stuff, other programs can, too, or just mess it up. Linux doesn't allow that.
Every time you request to do something that has to do with the system, an
administrator password is required (and if you're not an administrator on this system,
you simply can't do it). Viruses can't just go around and delete or modify what they
want in the system; they don't have the authorization for that.
More eyes make fewer security flaws. Linux is Open source software, which means
that any programmer in the world can have a look at the code (the "recipe" of any
program), and help out, or just tell other developers "Hey, what if blah blah, isn't this
a security flaw?".

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 NO Restart Needed

Have you just upgraded one or two little things on your Windows system with "Windows
update"? Please reboot. Have you just installed some new software? Please reboot. Does your
system seem unstable? Try to reboot, everything will probably work better after that.

Windows always asks you to restart your computer, and that can be annoying (maybe you
happen to have a long download going on, and you don't want to interrupt it just because you
updated a few pieces of your system). But even if you click "Restart later", Windows still keeps
bothering you every ten minutes to let you know that you really should restart the computer.
And if you happen to be away from your computer and you didn't see the question, it will
happily reboot automatically. Bye bye long download.

Linux basically doesn't need to restart. Whether you install new software (even very big
programs) or perform routine upgrades for your system, you will not be asked to restart the
computer. It is only necessary when a part from the heart of the system has been updated,
and that only happens once every several weeks.

Do you know Internet servers? They're the big computers that answer you when you ask for
a web page, and send the information to your browser. Most of them run Linux, and since
they need to always be available (a visitor could come anytime), they aren't restarted very
often (services aren't available while the system is starting). Actually, many of them haven't
restarted for several years. Linux is stable, it runs perfectly well without restarting all the time.

You'll probably not let your computer stay on for several weeks but the point is: the system
won't bother you with restarting all the time.

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 No Need of Drivers

New pieces of hardware, even the simplest kind, usually come with a CD. On the CD, a very
small piece of software called a "driver". If you read the instructions manual, you'll know that
the hardware won't work on a Windows computer until you install the driver. If you're like
most people and do not read the manual, then you'll probably figure it out yourself when you
see your new high-tech gizmo doesn't work out of the box.

Insert CD, click on installation wizard, wait, eject CD, reboot computer.

If you bought the hardware a while ago and are re-using it on another computer, you'll
probably want to forget about the CD and fetch the latest version of the driver from the
manufacturer's website. Which can take quite a bit of time, given how, huh, let's say strangely
organized some manufacturers' web sites are.

Okay, now that's only one piece of hardware. Now imagine you want to install Windows on a
whole new, untouched, computer. For each little piece of hardware you'll have to find the
latest driver (or use a CD), install it, and reboot from time to time. Video card, sound card,
keyboard, mouse, motherboard chipset, etc. (better do the video card driver first or you're
stuck with your high-end screen showing a very low resolution mode). And that comes after
an already rather long installation of Windows itself.

Linux doesn't need separate drivers. All the drivers are already included in the Linux kernel,
the core of the system, and that comes with every single Linux installation. This means:

A very fast and standalone installation process. Once you're done, you have
everything you need to start working (including the software you'll be using, see
"When the system has installed..." item on this website).
Out-of-the-box ready peripherals.
Less harm for the planet because all these CDs don't need to come with hardware any
more (well, at least once Windows don't need them either...).

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 Linux protects your computer

Viruses, trojans, adware, spyware... Windows lets all these enter your computer pretty easily.
The average period of time before a Windows PC (connected to the Internet and with a
default "Service Pack 2" installation) gets infected is 40 minutes (and it sometimes takes as
little time as 30 seconds).

So you can either 1) install a firewall, 2) install an antivrus program, 3) install an anti-adware
program, 4) get rid of Internet Explorer and Outlook (replacing them with Firefox and
Thunderbird), and 5) pray that people trying to get into your computer aren't smart enough
to overcome these protections and that, if a security flaw is discovered, Microsoft will take
less than a month to make an update available (and this doesn't happen very often). Or you
can install Linux and sleep soundly from now on.

As we have already said in the "virus" section, Open Source software (e.g. Linux) means more
eyes to check the code. Every programmer on Planet Earth can download the code, have a
look, and see whether it might have security flaws. On the other hand, the only people
allowed to look at the Windows source code (its "recipe") are people working for Microsoft.
That's hundreds of thousands of people (maybe millions) versus a few thousand. That makes
a big difference.

But actually, it isn't exactly a matter of how many flaws a system has, compared to the others.
If there are many flaws, but nobody has discovered them yet (including attackers), or they are
minor (they don't compromise an important part of the system), attackers won't be able to
do great damage. It is really a matter of how fast a security flaw can be solved once it has been
discovered. If a security flaw is discovered in an open source program, anyone in the open
source community can have a look and help solve it. The solution (and the update) usually
appears within a few days, sometimes even a few hours. Microsoft doesn't have that much
manpower, and usually releases security patches within about a month after the flaw has
been discovered (and sometimes published): that's more than enough for attackers to do
whatever they want with your computer.

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 Too many windows? Use workspaces.

I never was a Windows user and there is something I just cannot understand: once you have
your word processor, your web browser, your email application, your instant messenger
software and some windows open to explore your files, how do Windows users manage not
to get lost in this clutter?

Workspaces is a feature I would never trade for anything else. You probably only have one
screen, right? Try Linux, and you have four. Well, you can't actually look at the four of them
at the same time, but this doesn't matter since your eyes can't look in two directions at once,
right? On the first screen, lets put your word processor. On the second one, your instant
messenger software. On the third one, your web browser. So when you're writing something
in your word processor and you want to check out something on the web, no need to review
all your windows to find your browser, stacked all the way behind the others. You just switch
to your third screen and voil, here it is.

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 No more crapware.

If you've ever purchased a new computer running Windows, you must know that it can be a
very frustrating experience.

It all starts when you first turn it on: countless windows start to open, asking you to subscribe
for services, the premium version of an antivirus, games you never asked for, productivity
applications requiring you to create an account online, etc.

But it doesn't stop there. Each time you boot your computer, all those pre-installed programs
need to start in the background, and you have to wait longer and longer between the time
you see your desktop appear on the screen and the time when it stops being much too slow
to use because all those programs are starting up.

To add insult to injury, often times after you've owned your new computer for 30 days, new
dialogs start to pop up, and you realize that some of these programs that you thought were
free (for example, an antivirus) really aren't, all you have is a free 30-day trial.

The thing is, most computer manufacturers believe this is a good thing. They are installing
programs onto your computer before you purchase it, thinking they will improve your
experience, because you get "more" for the same price, and they believe this can help
differentiate them from the competitors, who may not offer as many "improvements" over
the default system, or maybe not the same ones. For them, this is added value.

But for the user, this is mostly more pain, more waiting, more uninstalling unwanted
programs, more money to pay if you decide you do need that not-so-free-after-all antivirus,
and at the end of the day, a bloated and crippled computer. That's why these programs have
been given a not very polite name: "crapware".

None of that with Linux. No program will nag you about subscribing, paying after a trial period
ends, or just slow your computer down and make you wait some more while it starts, just
when you thought it was ready to be used. Linux comes with everything that you need to start
working right away, without the crapware.

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 Freedom!

Linux and "Open Source" software are "free". This means their license is a "free license", and
the most common is the GPL (General Public License). This license states that anyone is
allowed to copy the software, see the source code (the "recipe"), modify it, and redistribute
it as long as it remains licensed with the GPL.

So what do you care about freedom? Imagine that Microsoft disappears tomorrow (okay,
that's not very likely, but what about in 5 years, 10 years?). Or imagine it suddenly triples the
price for a Windows or Office license. If you're tied to Windows, there's nothing you can do.
You (or your business) relies on this one company, on its software, and you can't possibly
make things work without it (what good is a computer without an operating system?). Isn't
that a serious problem? You're depending on one single company and trusting it
wholeheartedly to let something so important nowadays as your computers work the way
they should. If Microsoft decides to charge $1000 for the next version of Windows, there's
nothing you can do about it (except switch to Linux, of course). If Windows has a bug that
bothers you very much and Microsoft won't fix it, there's nothing you can do (and submitting
bugs to Microsoft isn't that easy, see the "Report bugs" section).

With Open Source, if a particular project or support company dies, all the code remains open
to the community and people can keep improving it. If this project is especially useful to you,
you can even do this yourself. If a particular bug annoys you, you can submit it, talk with the
developers, but even better, you can fix it yourself (or hire someone to do so), and send the
changes back to the upstream developers so that everyone gets the improvement as well.
You're free to do (nearly) whatever you want with the software.

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 Conclusion
The Latest LINUX Operating System therefore a recently developed system which has proved
the more convenient and efficient operating system from the processing point of view and
from the addition of latest soft-wares point of view. It has been considered as consisting of
an advance technology than WIN-98 and Windows-XP.

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 References.
www.google.com
OS by Tenenbaum.
Wikipedia.
www.whylinuxisbetter.com

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