Starting with Ubuntu

-
Image
Hardware is nothing but finely designed machinery. A machine is ultimately a machine only, which is always made to work. It is the kernel on an operating system that makes the hardware alive. There is a hugely popular operating system Linux which is mostly used in most sincere applications.  Linux is an open source operating system (i.e., its code is also available) created by a Finnish student Linus Torvalds . Linux is available in multiple distributions such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and many more. In this session, you shall learn to work with Ubuntu distribution of Linux. It's derived from Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in multiple editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of things devices and robots. The operating system is developed by the British company Canonical and a community of other developers, under a meritocratic governance model. Starting Ubuntu When you boot your comput
Post a Comment

Softwares and their types

-

 In this session we are going to study about the basic types of computer softwares that we use in our daily life. 


A Software is a set of programs, which is designed to perform a well defined function. A program is a sequence of instruction written to solve a particular problem.

There are three types of software:
  • System software 
  • Application software
  • Utility software

System Software

The system software is a collection of programs designed to operate,control and extend the processing capabilities of the computer itself. System software serves as the interface between the hardware and the end users.



Features of a system software:
  • Close to the system
  • Fast in speed
  • Difficult to understand 
  • Less interactive
  • Smaller in size 
  • Difficult to manipulate
  • Generally written in low level language 
There are three types of system software:
  • Operating systems
  • Language processors 
  • Device drivers

Operating Systems

An Operating system (OS) is an interface between a computer user and computer hardware. An operating system is a software which performs all the basic tasks like file management, process management, handling input and output, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware,although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it.
Some popular operating systems includes Linux Operating System, Windows, MacOS, VMS OS, AIX,etc




Features of  Operating Systems:
  • Memory Management 
  • Processor Management 
  • Device Management 
  • File Manegement
  • Security 
  • Error detecting aids
  • System performance
  • System User coordination
  • Job accounting
 
Language Processors 

A special translating software is used to translate the program written in high level language into machine made code is called  Language processor and the program after translated into machine code (object program/object code).The term is also used for translators between software implementations and hardware/ASIC microchip implementations of the same program, and from software descriptions of a microchip to the logic gates needed to build it.
There are three types of language processors:
  • Compiler 
  • Assembler
  • Interpreter



Compiler
The language processor that reads the complete source program written in high level language as a whole in one go and translate it into an equivalent program in machine language is called as a compiler.There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A cross-compiler produces code for a different CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A bootstrap compiler is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimised compiler for a language.
Ex:C,C++,C#,Java, etc.






Assembler
The Assembler is used to translate the program written in assembly language into machine code. The output generated by assembler is  the object code or machine code understandable by the computer. Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universally with any operating system, as the language provides access to all the real capabilities of the processor, upon which all system call mechanisms ultimately rest. In contrast to assembly languages, most high-level programming languages are generally portable across multiple architectures but require interpreting or compiling, much more complicated tasks than assembling.
Ex:EAX,EBX,ECX,etc.






Interpreter
The translation of single statement of source program into machine code is done by language processor and executes it immediately before moving on to the next line is called an interpreter.Early versions of Lisp programming language and minicomputer and microcomputer BASIC dialects would be examples of the first type. Perl, Raku, Python, MATLAB, and Ruby are examples of the second, while UCSD Pascal is an example of the third type. 




Device Drivers
 
System software that controls and monitors functioning of a specific device on computer is called device driver. It is programmed without using a User Interface (UI). The hardware is linked to a computer bus/communication subsystem via which device drivers interact with the device. They are hardware-dependent and operating-system-specific (OS). They offer the interrupt processing essential for any time-dependent asynchronous hardware interface. Each device like printers, scanner, microphone, speaker,etc, has a device driving software.




Application Software:

Application Software products are designed to satisfy a particular need of a particular environment. Some examples of application softwares are as follows:
  • Payroll software
  • Inventory management software 
  • Income tax software 
  • Microsoft Word
Features of application software:
  • Easy to design 
  • More Interactive
  • Easy to understand 
  • Easy to manipulate and use 
  • Slow in speed
Applications may be bundled with the computer and its system software or published separately and may be coded as proprietary, open-source, or projects. The term "app" usually refers to applications for mobile devices such as phones.
The delineation between system software such as operating systems and application software is not exact, however, and is occasionally the object of controversy. For example, one of the key questions in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial was whether Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was part of its Windows operating system or a separate piece of application software. As another example, the GNU/Linux naming controversy is, in part, due to disagreement about the relationship between the Linux kernel and the operating systems built over this kernel. In some types of embedded systems, the application software and the operating system software may be indistinguishable from the user, as in the case of software used to control a VCR, DVD player, or microwave oven. The above definitions may exclude some applications that may exist on some computers in large organisations. For an alternative definition of an app: see Application Portfolio Management.




 Utility Software

Application software that assists system software in doing their work is called Utility Software. Thus Utility software is actually a cross between system  software and application software.Some utility software used in daily life are :
  • Antivirus
  • Disk management tools 
  • File management tools 
  • Compression tools 
  • Backup tools
Although a basic set of utility programs is usually distributed with an operating system (OS), and this first party utility software is often considered part of the operating system, users often install replacements or additional utilities. Those utilities may provide additional facilities to carry out tasks that are beyond the capabilities of the operating system.
Many utilities that might affect the entire computer system require the user to have elevated privileges, while others that operate only on the user's data do not.








Comments

Post a Comment

For any correction, doubts or suggestion, please let me know

Popular posts from this blog

Preprocessor Directives in C

-
Image
 Preprocessing is an initial phase to process text before compilation. Preprocessor directives are lines of the source file where the first non-whitespace character is #, which distinguishes them from other lines of text. It operates under the control of preprocessor directive which is placed in the source program before the main(). Before the source code is passed through the compiler, it is examined by the preprocessor for any preprocessor directives. The preprocessor directives are always preceded by a hash sign (#). The preprocessor is executed before the actual compilation of program code begins.  Therefore, the preprocessor expands all the directives and take the corresponding actions before any code is generated by the program statements. No semicolon (;) can be placed at the end of a preprocessor directive.  Advantages of preprocessor directives The advantages of using preprocessor directives in a C program include: Program becomes readable and easy to understand  Program can b
Read more

Function Generator

-
Image
 In electrical and electronics engineering, a function generator is usually a piece of electronic test equipment or software used to generate different types of electrical waveforms over a wide range of frequencies. Some of the most common waveforms produced by the function generator are the sine wave, square wave, triangular wave and sawtooth shapes. These waveforms can be either repetitive or single-shot (which requires an internal or external trigger source). Another feature included on many function generators is the ability to add a DC offset. Integrated circuits used to generate waveforms may also be described as function generator ICs. In particular it can be made to become a sine wave generator, square wave generator, and triangular wave generator. Also a function generator may be able to vary the characteristics of the waveforms, changing the length of the pulse, i.e. the mark space ratio, or the ramps of the different edges of triangular or sawtooth waveforms. The function ge
Read more

The World Of Linux

-
Image
Linux is an open source operating system (OS). It was originally conceived of and created as a hobby by Linus Torvalds in 1991 . Linus, while at university, sought to create an alternative, free, open source version of the MINIX operating system, which was itself based on the principles and design of Unix. That hobby has since become the OS with the largest user base, the most-used OS on publicly available internet servers, and the only OS used on the top 500 fastest supercomputers.  Perhaps the best thing about Linux is that it's open source. Linux is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). That means that anyone can run, study, share, and modify the software. The modified code can also be redistributed, and even sold, but must be done so under the same license. This differs greatly from traditional operating systems—Unix and Windows, for example—which are proprietary, locked-down, and delivered as-is and unmodifiable. From smartphones to cars, supercomputers and h
Read more