Comparison of Windows and Linux Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Comparison of Windows and Linux - Essay Example BIOS (Basic Input Output System): This is a firmware and is used to iniate the harddisks, and CDRoms while booting the system. The BIOS runs from the PROM, EPROM or, most commonly, flash memory when the computer is powered on. It initializes several motherboard components and peripherals.An operating system is software that is responsible for the management of the resources of a computer. It has the capability of taking input from the user and performs activities such as allocating memory, controlling peripherals, managing file system and facilitating networking with other devices. It provides the user with a common platform to install more application software as per their requirements. The user interacts with the system with by the command-line or graphical user interface. Other activities performed by the operating systems are;Process Management: Previously what happened is that mostly one task was executed at a time by the processor i.e. the DOS only ran on sequentially executing a single statement at a time. The new operating systems however, are efficient in terms of saving and utilizing the CPU idle time in a better way. This is now possible by the capability of quickly shifting between tasks.Memory Management: An operating system memory manager actually prioritizes the use of different types of available memories. This is done on the bases of their transfer rate and volatility. This includes registers and Cache's in the CPU and RAM which is the memory specifically assigned with this task. All applications and softwares including the operating system are first included in the memory, mostly in RAM and from there the active processes i.e. the processes being currently in access by the user are retrived for further work. File-system Management: Operating systems usually have this tool for the purpose of arranging the disk space. This is done so that the files can be copied to and from the disk properly. Windows operating systems support Fat 16, Fat 32 and NTFS (Latest and most efficient files-system included with Windows NT). Linux supports EXT 2, EXT 3, GFS, GFS2, XFS, NILFS and many other formats including FAT and NTFS formats. Other tasks performed by the activities such are networking and guarding the system by implementing internal and external security are also important task. The authentication process of Windows is based mainly on the Kerberosv5 authentication and NTLM authentication which are considered as the industry standards (Microsoft Technical Documentation IIS 6.0). Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) uses ASP coding to encrypt and verify User and Host Identity. Linux was written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. The purpose was to have an open source free operating system. This enabled contributions from programmers towards the Cause and hence after several changes Linux has been developed into a very sophisticated operating system. Linux being open source software doesn't provide any specific authentication. Though similar efforts have been done by vendors like Red Hat, which have included the authentication algorithms