Linux Ingredients

My today’s blog is for those readers who are newbie to Linux Operating system. This blog will help you to know what all the Linux OS consists of.

 Fig1: TUX

Now say, for an instance you want to cook a dish. In order to cook that dish you need to know the recipe of that dish. In the same way my today’s blog is about the ingredients that make up Linux OS. Linux contain the Grub boot loader, Bash shell, GNU shell utilities, daemons, X.org graphical server, a desktop environment, and more. These programs are developed by different, independent development groups.

So let’s start. Following names mentioned before the colon is the name which I have given and which is mapped into our daily life.

The Supporters: Daemons

These are the background processes. They start at booting process, so they’re one of the next things that loads after the kernel and before you see your graphical login screen. For example, CRON-D manages the scheduled tasks, which is a daemon; d at the end stands for “daemon.” syslogd is another daemon that traditionally manages system log. 

Fig 2: Linux Daemon

The Heart: Boot loader

When our PC is turned “ON”, our computer’s BIOS or UEFI firmware loads the software from our boot device. It is the first program that loads with any operating system. For Linux, it is called as Grub boot loader. For multiple OS, we are provided the choices to select our desire OS. 

Fig 3: Grub Boot Loader

The Slate: Shell

Linux provides various shells. Most Linux systems use the Bash shell by default. Various other shells are C-shell, Korne shell, Borne shell. Shell provides a command processor interface, and allows controlling computer by typing commands at a text interface. Shells are used to run shell scripts.

 Fig 4: Linux-terminal-bash-shell

The Central Core: Linux Kernel

The precise piece of software Grub boots is the Linux kernel. The kernel is the core of the system. It is responsible for managing CPU, memory, and input/output devices like keyboard, mice, and displays.

The Value addition: Shell utilities

The shell provides some basic built-in commands; For example, commands as critical as the cp command for copying a file, ls command for listing files in a directory, and rm command for deleting files are part of the GNU Core Utilities package.

The Most User Friendly Thing: Graphical Desktop

Desktop of Linux is very user friendly and is same as the desktop of window. They include their own utilities built to fit in with the desktop environment as a whole, like GNOME and Unity include the Nautilus file manager developed as a part of GNOME, whereas KDE includes the Dolphin file manager developed as a part of the KDE project.

Fig5: Desktop Environment

Thus this all are the key ingredients of the Linux OS. Now I am very sure that if asked, that what all Linux OS consist of then, all my readers will be able to answer it.