Comparison of windows 2000 and linux

CONTENTS

1. 
   Ease of use.
   
2. 
   User assistance
   
3. 
   History
   
4. 
   Technical assistance
   
5. 
   Pricing
   

1. 
   Stability
   
2. 
   Plug ‘n play
   
3. 
   System resilience
   
4. 
   Workload management
   
5. 
   Partitioning support
   
6. 
   Web service support
   
7. 
   Flexibility of commands
   
8. 
   Complexity
   
9. 
   Speed of execution
   

Operating system, being the nucleus, is responsible for all the actions a computer performs. Hence it has to be designed in such a way that it makes an efficient use of the system resources and perform all the desired activities. With the advent of new technologies and improvements in the already existing ones, it has become equally important for the operating system to support them, as to perform well with what it has. So, the operating systems should be designed with a foresight in such a way that it is fine with the existing technology and copes with the new technologies. At present, we have a lot of operating systems of which only a few have turned out successful. In this paper, a brief comparison of the two representative operating systems namely windows 2000 and Linux has been made. Following is the comparison of these two operating systems generally and then targeting on the aspects of performance and security.

The Windows traces its history from the time when the Microsoft developed a GUI based operating system to compete with the Macintosh. That was Win 3.0.It was basically developed as a desktop operating system. Then slowly the other versions of Windows were developed. Finally Windows-95 was released with much more features and later Windows-NT and then the version of Windows 2000 was released. This was developed to exploit the capabilities of a 32-bit processor.

• 
  Windows 2000 has the same executive and microkernal architecture as the Windows NT 4.0.
  
• 
  Windows 2000 is both single-user multitasking (W2K-professional) and multi-user multitasking (W2K server).
  
• 
  Windows 2000 supports threads, SMP and IPC.
  
• 
  It supports also the concept of multithreading within a single process.
  
• 
  The thread management is fully by the kernel.
  
• 
  The processes and threads are implemented as objects.
  
• 
  It has got mechanisms for concurrency namely semaphores, mutex etc.,
  
• 
  The scheduling is priority-driven preemptive round robin within a priority level.
  

It was in August 1991, when Linux first started to get into shape as a primitive operating system resembling minix. With its developer Linus Tovalds’ efforts, it soon took its shape as a major operating system. As it was given for free, many got interested in that effort and joined hands with Linus forming the Open-Source Society (OSS) and now it’s a potential alternate to Windows, a well-established operating system.

• 
  Linux can be considered a full-featured Unix system running on a variety of platforms.
  
• 
  It has a modular structure, that is, the kernel is organized in as a collection of loadable module.
  
• 
  The thread management is fully by the kernel.
  
• 
  Process are represented not as objects as in windows but represented as a task_datastructure.
  
• 
  It supports virtual memory and the virtual memory management is by the 3 levels of paging structures.
  
• 
  The scheduling policy followed here is the enhancement of traditional Unix scheduling with two new scheduling classes with the total of three classes namely SCHED_RR, SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_OTHER.
  

A user’s acceptance of an interface depends mainly on the ease-of-use, quality and performance that it provides when trying to complete a specific task. An analysis of the organization and time/performance ratio of two different operating environments shows that advanced (power) users generally prefer a command-line interface to a system whereas novice users almost always prefer the graphical environment because of it’s visual object oriented approach to the system.