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How Windows 2000/XP/Vista Works
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A shell is the portion of an OS that relates to the user and to applications. The first Linux
and Unix shells consisted of commands entered at a command prompt. Two popular
command-line shells for Unix and Linux are the older Bourne shell and the newer BourneAgain shell (BASH). But many users prefer a Windows-style GUI desktop. These GUI shells
are built using a technology called X Windows. The most popular GUI shells are GNOME,
KDE, and Xfce. A typical Linux desktop is shown in Figure 2-9.
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Figure 2-9 A desktop using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux
Courtesy: Course Technology/Cengage Learning
Notes You can find out more about Linux by reading the content, “Introducing Linux,” on the CD
that accompanies this book or by visiting the web site, www.linux.org.
Now that you know a little about operating systems in general, let’s turn our attention to
learning about the Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating system.
HOW WINDOWS 2000/XP/VISTA WORKS
Windows 2000, XP, and Vista are three evolutions of the same basic operating system.
Therefore, they have many things in common. In this part of the chapter, we’ll look under the
hood of these OSs to see how they are built, what are the main components, and how the OS
interfaces with users, applications, data, and hardware. We begin our discussion by looking
at the four main functions of any OS, and then we’ll look at how Windows accomplishes
these four functions.
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