Enjoy Unix-based Utilities under Windows Using Cygwin

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It is sometimes necessary for users of Windows to run Linux based programs and vice versa. Unfortunately, this problem is not addressed by either using a dual boot system or using Wine, if your primary OS is Windows. This is the reason why a tool, such as Cygwin, becomes very useful that allows you to use Linux based utilities on Windows. Cygwin acts as an emulation layer on top of a Windows installation that allows the UNIX applications to run.

A good thing about Cygwin is that it is a free software that can run on several versions of MS Windows ranging from the Windows 9x series to Windows 7. In order to install Cygwin on your Windows machine, you need to have at least 1 GB of free hard disk space available for a minimal install of Cygwin. For a full installation of Cygwin, a minimum of 5 GM of hard disk space is required. However, full installation of Cygwin is recommended only for the users who are more interested in working on Unix or Linux environment than Windows.

One more thing you need to be careful while installing Cygwin is your anti-virus software. You may need to temporarily deactivate the anti-virus protection while Cygwin is being installed, otherwise your anti-virus may report Cygwin as a threat. You can install Cygwin directly from the Internet if you have an active Internet connection while installing Cygwin or you can install Cygwin from a locally stored installer of Cygwin. You can select from the available packages with Cygwin during the installation based on your needs and usage of Linux utilities.

Cygwin is a powerful tool that can address the problem of cross-compatibility between Windows and Linux based operating systems. This allows you to utilize a number of utilities that are available with Linux from right within your Windows environment. Cygwin provides you an environment so similar to Linux that you may even sometime forget that you’re actually running it under Windows.

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Know About the Running Processes with the PS Command

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The Linux operating system has many important concepts that help developers and administrators ensure a smooth functioning of the applications developed for Linux. One of such important concepts of operating systems is concept of processes. A process in Linux represents an instance of a running program. The Linux operating system assigns a unique identifier, process id, to each running process. In order to know the details related to the processes running under Linux, you can use the ps command.

The ps command has the following basic syntax:
ps [options]

When you run the ps command on the command prompt, it displays the information about at least two processes, shell and ps. Shell is the process that runs in order to provide users an environment to interact with the operating system. The ps process is displayed as a result of executing the ps command, which terminates immediately after running the ps command.

The ps command displays four pieces of information related to the running processes by default. These pieces of information are PID, TTY, TIME and CMD. PID is the process id of the process, TTY indicates the name of logged in terminal (console), TIME is an indicative of the processing time the CPU has spent executing the process, and CMD is the name of command result in the process execution.
There are various common usages of ps command with varying values of the options used while running the ps command. For example, in order to get a list of processes containing the word, app, you can issue the ps command with the grep command as follows:
ps -ef| grep app
Similarly, the ps command can issue the list of processes based on various criteria specified by various options, such as aux, -u, -ef, -x, etc. These options can be used for various purposes, such as killing a non-responsive process. You can easily find the process id of a particular process and issue the kill command with the process id thus found.

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Security Features of Linux and Windows

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Linux has been originated from its predecessor, UNIX, which was known for its security related features. The modern versions of Linux inherit the same security foundation as UNIX with several enhanced security features. At the same time, several modern versions of the Windows operating system have also taken security as a serious concern. In this era of network connected computers, security of computers is an important aspect of design of the various operating systems. This article discusses the comparison of security related features of the Linux and Windows operating systems.

Firewall security: Linux firewall is known to be much more secured and richer in terms of features than its Windows firewall. What it means to you as an end user is that you can comfortably rely on the default levels of Internet security if you work on Linux. However, you need to buy an expensive third party firewall, if you are a heavy Internet user. On the other hand, configuring the powerful Linux firewall can be a complicated task for a novice home user.

File system: Linux and all the UNIX-based operating systems have a file structure that keeps the similar files, such as data, program files, configuration files etc. This allows a better placement of security policies to protect sensitive areas of the file system. However, the security policies in Windows cannot be placed at this level because application binaries are often mixed with other file types in Windows file system.

Services: The Linux counterpart of the Windows services are known as daemons. These daemons are designed to run at finer levels of user granularity than in Windows. For instance, a super user in Windows can run several system-level or application-level services whereas in Linux, any user can only run the daemons meant to be run by that user. This prevents the possibility of an attack to compromise the entire computer at a time.

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