Peripherals: Another thing that you need to look at to explain the function of computer hardware components is peripherals such as input and output devices and cabling.
Output devices consists of monitor, printers, plotters, or speaker. A monitor sometimes known as a VDU (Visual Display Unit) outputs the signal from the operating system and applications to show the information to the end user. Monitors are improving all the time in terms of picture quality, power consumption and weight to size ration. Printer and plotter are used to output information designed on a computer system in printed format. Plotter are used by sign writing companies to cut out stick on vinyl. Specialize design software is used to control the cutter on the plotter by outputting a signal.
Input devices: such as cameras, scanners, keyboard or mouse are used to input information into a computer system. In the case of a camera it can by connected to a computer system and images uploaded and editing. The images can also be printed out after they have been input from the camera.
Scanners are used to input images of documents into digital format on a computer system. A scanner is particularly useful for backing up signed documents for company records. Obviously a Keyboard and mouse are the main input devices used to control a computer system to type information and control the cursor on screen.
Cabling is used to connect peripheral to a computer and to connect the computer to a network.
Coaxial cable can be used for television and computer data application and the signal noise is reduced by shielding.
Two types of networking cable are optical of fiber optic cable and twisted pair cables. Fiber optical cables are high speed network cables that transmit light pulses through an optical fiber to transfer data at high speed. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) provide high speed internet connection using fiber optic networks. Fiber optic cable are expensive. Standard Ethernet cables use twisted pair technology. The twisted wires work in tandem to cancel out any noise loss between them. The interference on one cable is cancelled by the other cable and this is an effective data transmission solution over a network.
BACKING STORAGE
Backing storage is used to back up information stored on a computer system. By performing regular data backups you limit the chances of losing valuable information stored on the system. If you backup regular then a computer system can be restored easily without any data loss. There are many types of backing devices both portable and fixed solutions and the performance of backup is effected by the data transfer rate and storage capacity of the backup storage device.
One form of backing storage is optical media such as compact
Disk
These can be used for small backup applications as they are limited by size. An example might be to back up website html and image files to a CD. CDs can only be written to once but a CD-RW storage device is a rewritable disk that can be used as a recurring backup. CDs can be
purchased in different read/write speeds. A USB or Pen drive is a small
portable storage device that is made using flash memory. USB pen drives have developed over time and USB 2.0 and 3.0 offer faster read/write storage backup that earlier versions. Whist USB drives started out at very small about 128Mb they can now be purchased in much bigger sizes such as 1Tb. They were initially very expensive but the price has dramatically decreased in the past few years making them a viable backup storage solution for individuals.
2.4 PERFORMANCE AND APPLICATIONS OF LINUX OS
The performance of Linux on the desktop has been a controversial topic; for example in 2007 Con Kolivas accused the Linux community of favoring performance on servers. He quit Linux kernel development out of frustration with this lack of focus on the desktop, and then gave a “tell all†interview on the topic. Since then a significant amount of development has focused on improving the desktop experience. Wayland and Mir projects aim at replacing X11 while enhancing desktop performance, security and appearance.
Many popular applications are available for a wide variety of operating systems. For example, Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and Blender have downloadable versions for all major operating system. Furthermore, some applications initially developed for Linux, such as pidgin, and GIMP, were ported to other operating systems (including Windows and Mac OS X) due to their popularity. In addition, a growing number of proprietary desktop applications are also supported on Linux, such as Autodesk Maya, Softimage XSI and Apple Shake in the high-end field of animation and visual effect; see the list of proprietary software for Linux for more detail. There are also several companies that have ported their own or other companies’ games to Linux, with Linux also being a supported platform on both the popular Steam and Desura digital- distribution services.
Many other types of applications available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X also run on Linux. Commonly, either a free software application will exist which the functions of an application found on another operating system, or that application we have a version that works on Linux, such as with Skype and some videos games like Dota 2 and team fortress 2. Furthermore, the one project provides a window compatibility layer to run unmodified windows application of Linux. It is sponsored by commercial interest including code weavers, which produces a commercial version of software. Since 2009, Google has always provided funding to the wine project. cross over, a proprietary solution based on the open source wine project, support running windows version of Microsoft office, intuit application such as quicken and QuickBooks, adobe Photoshop version through cs2 and many popular games such as world of Warcraft. In other cases, where there is no Linux port of some software in areas such as desktop publishing and professional audio, there is equivalent software available on Linux.
2.5 COMPONENTS AND INSTALLATION OF LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM
Besides externally visible components, such as x window managers, a non-obvious but quite central role is played by the programs hosted by freedeskop.org, such as D-Bus or pulse Audio; both major desktop environment (GNOME and KDE) include them each offering graphical front-end written using the corresponding toolkit (GTK + or Qt). A display server is another component, which for the largest longest time has been communicating in the X11 display server protocol with its clients; prominent software talking x11 includes the x.org server Xlib. Frustration over the cumbersome X11 core protocol and especially over its numerous extension as led to the creation of a new display server protocol, way land installing, updating and removing software in Linux is typically done through the use of package managers such as the synaptic package managers, PACKAGEKIT, and yum extender. while most Linux distributions have extensive repositories often containing tens of thousands of packages, not all the software that can run on Linux is available from the official repositories, alternatively, users can install packages from unofficial repositories, download pre-compiled packages directly from websites, or compile the source code by themselves. All these methods come with different degrees of difficulty; compiling the source code is in general considered a challenging process for new Linux users, but it is hardly needed in modern distributions and is not a method specific to Linux.
