Course description:
Survey of the operating system facilities and commands. Installation and maintenance of operating systems such as Linux. Understanding process management, file systems, memory and virtual memory management issues. Understanding networking and its role in modern computing environment. Operating system security. Writing shell scripts and batch files.

Textbook: A Practical Guide to Linux, by M. Sobell.

Grading system:

Homeworks (about 13)	20 points each
Labs (about 14)	10 points each
Lecture questionaires (about 13)	5 points each
Forum participation	10 points
Final exam	50 points

Guidelines for class work

• The lectures, assignments, and labs will be posted on the course web page and on Oncourse. Each lecture will be accompanied by a questionnaire to be completed during the week when the lecture is posted.
• The assignments, labs, and questionaires are due at midnight of the due date.
• The assignments and labs are turned in through the Oncourse assignment system.
• No homework/lab accepted after 2 weeks from the due date. A homework or lab turned in 1 week late loses 25% of the points. A homework or lab turned in 2 weeks late loses 50% of the points.
• All work is individual and too similar submissions can be penalized.

Course Objectives

• To be able to use Linux command-line commands to perform file and system operations, knowing the difference between arguments and options.
• To define processes, to be able to identify active processes on Linux and manage them (ps, kill).
• To be able to compile C++ programs on Linux using the g++ compiler, to handle compiling multiple files, and to use the gdb debugger.
• To become familiar with the structure of a Makefile and be able to create/edit one.
• To create a web site in the Linux account and be able to map local addresses to URLs.
• To be introduced to a scripted language, in this case Python, and to see how such a script can communicate with the operating system.
• To get some exposure to Linux administrative tasks.
• Basic familiarity with networking hardware, software, topology and protocols.
• Monitoring of system resources (processes, storage usage, network usage, etc.)
• Installation of operating systems (partitioning, formatting, installation of hardware devices, user management (creating Users and Groups), server management (initiation and termination of server services).