Today marks the end of my Operating Systems class at school, and I must say that I really enjoyed the class. The downside to the class was the material was a little dated. I was kind of sad by that aspect of it, but we made up for it by researching and writing papers on current operating systems. Some of the class discussions confused me considering we were asked about stuff that occurred six years ago or sometimes even ten years ago. In computer terms, six years is a very long time.
I felt that I knew quite a bit about operating systems considering I have been using them since MS-DOS all the way up to Windows 7. During the last two years I have played around with Ubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Puppy Linux, and Fedora. I never considered how major of a role the operating system plays in managing system resources like the processor, memory, and other types of hardware. I was fascinated in learning how operating system development has changed over the years to take full advantage of processor use and improve memory management. Those are things we don’t really think about as we open programs and play around on Facebook, so it was nice to understand how that stuff works and what works better than others.
One aspect of the class that I really enjoyed was learning about virtual environments. I vaguely knew what a virtual desktop was, but I didn’t really understand it fully or had any reason to think about it and consider the possibilities of using virtual environments. That is one reason why I decided to install Linux Mint on Windows 7 using VirtualBox. I wanted to see what it was like to run my own virtual desktop. More importantly, it allowed me to understand how sandbox mode works in some antivirus and antispyware programs to keep the computer safe using a virtual desktop.
Not only did I further my knowledge and understanding of operating systems, but I have also found myself using this information at work to help out my customers even better, which I found to be very rewarding. We are told all the time that what we learn in school should be applied to our lives, and I find myself doing that almost every day.
Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I do plan to use this blog to help further my understanding as I continue with my classes at school, so expect to see some blog posts where I basically think with my fingers and write out my thoughts on what I am reading and learning. As always, I look forward to comments from those who read my posts because some of you may help me understand my material even more.
Tomorrow, I start my database concepts class. I look forward to this class because I have been wanting to learn more about databases recently.
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