Week 25 – The OS Universe

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This was the first week of the curriculum’s Operating Systems course and it had me quickly embarking on using Linux commands and learning basic shell programming. The goal this week was to get comfortable with the Linux environment by learning the fundamentals of commands, working with a text editor, and creating simple bash scripts. Lab 1 provided the perfect amount of difficultly in that it allowed me to set up my Linux environment and get my working applications in order to complete a simple bash script. In our discussion this week, we discussed topics related to file management and shell scripts. This helped consolidate the information presented in the course.

The lecture material provided us with guides on a range of foundational concepts such as programming and computer architecture. We reviewed techniques for number conversions between binary, decimal, octal, and hexadecimal, and were introduced to the fundamentals of the C programming language. We were also provided useful material for data representation and files and permissions.

Additionally, I took things a step further by switching my operating system to Ubuntu. I did this in part because our classes’ Linux server was down, but also because I’ve wanted to delve into Linux for a long now. I tried a few years back, and I enjoyed it, but found that it was way too different from conventional operating systems. Although I had an interest in Linux, I ended up switching back to Windows. Switching to Linux this time around went a lot smoother. During the times of Ubuntu 18, there was still quite a lot Linux couldn’t offer me as a regular OS user, but today it seems like there are so many open-source application alternatives and it’s clear that the community is growing. I’m currently using Ubuntu 24. So this week I had to get all of my working apps, or Linux equivalents. I also had to deal with errors that came with wielding too much power, I broke my file system a bit and experienced some hard drive mounting issues which I eventually had to learn how to fix.

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