Exercises

First exercise has been posted in submitweb. The exercise due date is on 16/12/08.
Please refer to http://www.submitweb.org/ sign up and join your relevant course:

• Computational bioligy class - Operating Systems - Bio (2008-2009).

• Engineering class - Operating Systems - Engineering (2008 - 2009).

Good luck.

Code examples

In this post I'll add links to some of the source code we see in class.

File redirection to STDIN: dup2.c
Environment variables example: environ.c
Anonymous pipe example: pipe.c
execve() example: exec.c
pipe() and dup2() basic structure (code compiles but does nothing): pipedup2.c
Simple tcp server. Each connections echo back to the client what he receives. socket.c

Using Linux at home

There are many ways you can have Linux at home.
The obvious ways are to install it on your computer or have a dual-boot of Linux and Windows, that is you can boot your system to either Linux or Windows.
Since I know most of you don't really like that idea of giving up Windows all together or having multiple operating systems, there are also a few options to have Linux run as an application inside your Windows operating system, much like running a word processor for example. The way to do this is by either installing Cygwin or some kind of a VM (virtual machine) and running Linux inside it. I prefer the latter option myself, but hey it's just me - you can do whatever is easier for you.
I've checked myself the follwing and I can say that its totally free and works good enough for the needs at the operating systems course. An abstract of what I did is, I've downloaded VMware Player and a VM distribution of Ubuntu 8.10. Here are the details of how to do it yourself:

1. Download a VMware Player from the vmware site.
2. Download a Ubuntu 8.10 VM from here using BitTorrent (any BitTorrent client will do for example uTorrent).
3. Unzip the file you've just downloaded from BitTorrent and open it using the VMware Player. You'll probably get some messages from the VMware Player. Read them and act using common knowledge.
4. The username and password are both set to be tuxdistro.
   

Good luck.

Presentations

I used OpenOffice to create the presentations so anybody that wants to view them needs to download OpenOffice which is basically a free-office suite. To download OpenOffice you can follow this link, or if you're using Linux you can download it using your package manager such as Synaptic for Debian or Ubuntu.

And now for the presentations...
Introduction presentaion.
The basics of files presentation.
Processes presentation.
Pipes presentation.
Signals presentation.
SysV IPC presentation.