How do you define Operating System?
Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 12:38 pm
I was looking at the wikipedia entry for Operating System and was surprised how short the definition was. We have a little bit of a definition of an operating system going on in the OSDev wiki that implies there is more to an OS like resource control but it still needs more added I feel. How do you define an operating system? Take Linux for example; Linux itself is a kernel which is part of the OS but what parts of a Linux distro are also the OS? If a web server is compiled into the kernel does that become part of the OS? There is also the Google operating system definition search for more brief definitions.