Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the extreme case - user can use a computer without a GUI and even browse the internet in a terminal, without images, in Lynx, on a weak computer. A light-weight Linux distribution is a Linux distribution that uses lower memory and processor-speed requirements than a more "feature-rich" Linux distribution.
Tiny Core Linux is an example of Linux distribution that run from RAM. This is a list of Linux distributions that can be run entirely from a computer's RAM, meaning that once the OS has been loaded to the RAM, the media it was loaded from can be completely removed, and the distribution will run the PC through the RAM only.
Unlike other operating systems, Linux and Unix allow any file system regardless of the medium it is stored on, whether that medium is a magnetic disk, an optical disk (CD, DVD, etc.), a USB flash memory key, or even contained within a file located on another file system.
The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers. Because of the large number and variety of available Linux distributions, they are all grouped under a single entry; see comparison of Linux distributions for a detailed ...
Linux distributions that have highly modified kernels — for example, real-time computing kernels — should be listed separately. There are also a wide variety of minor BSD operating systems, many of which can be found at comparison of BSD operating systems .
Besides the Linux distributions designed for general-purpose use on desktops and servers, distributions may be specialized for different purposes including computer architecture support, embedded systems, stability, security, localization to a specific region or language, targeting of specific user groups, support for real-time applications, or commitment to a given desktop environment.
When used for swap, zram (like zswap) allows Linux to make more efficient use of RAM, since the operating system can then hold more pages of memory in the compressed swap than if the same amount of RAM had been used as application memory or disk cache. This is particularly effective on machines that do not have much memory.
A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or separate regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. [ 1 ] [ a ] Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour.