Last week, the small group of us doing the Polytech computing course finished our second unit, which was on Operating Systems. For this we looked at two different operating systems, the first one being DOS (where we actually used Command Prompt because most of the commands are the same) and Linux (Kubuntu if you need to know the distro.) The reason we looked at these two is because for the standard, we are required to look at a single user and multi user operating system.

The first section involved a bit of research and learning the terminology of how Operating Systems work. We weren’t tested on any of this stuff. Then we were messing around with basic commands in cmd. Then we were trying out some basic commands in the Linux console. For this we used a Kubuntu Live CD. We didn’t get into anything that technical, basically only file manipulation stuff, and this was mainly due to the time limits. For example, we only had 5 hours on Linux, 4 if you exclude the test week, 3 if you exclude the week everyone was away/sick. It’s very difficult to learn anything advanced in that short amount of time.

The unit seemed shorter than the first one but I think it was because it was broken up into sections, so it seemed like we weren’t working on it for long. Anyway, now we move onto our final unit, System Programming. For this we were given Atmel AVR Butterfly’s, which we get to keep, for programming. I’m not really sure what we are going to be making the things do but they seem like pretty sweet gizmos. Can’t wait to get into it!