Operating systems

An operating system is just a program that allow us control the computer. When we boot the computer this is the first program that we see.

In the wikipedia we can find a good explanation about what an operating system is and about the common characteristics of modern operating systems.

Here we can learn how an operating system works.

GNU Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX... are examples of operating systems.

GNU Linux is a free operating system. This means that usually you can get it for free and also that you have freedom to modify it and see how it works.

As any person with enough knowledge is free to modify the GNU Linux operating system we can find a lot of different versions of it. For the classes we will use a famous version of GNU Linux called Ubuntu.

A good place to begin to learn how to use Ubuntu is the Ubuntu Documentation Webpage.