Understanding the Kernel Linux - Essay Example

Kernel interacts with the shell including all the computer hardware components, such as the processor, memory and computer disk drives.

In Linux, commands and program execution are by a command interpreter which is represented by a shell. Kernel components are designed for specific operating systems but the main components of a Kernel are composed of four basic elements which include; a scheduler which functions to share and processing time of various computer processes; a supervisor which grants permission to every process as it is scheduled; interrupt handler for the handling of requests from computer hard disk components and memory manager for allocating system space Kernel’s services. The most five popular distributions of Kernel Linux include; Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian and Linux Mint. Subsequently, there are numerous shell distributions that are available for the kernel, among these include, sh, bash and tcsh. (Bovet & Cesati, 2005) 

When using several commands in bash, it is essential that alias definitions be made permanent so that the user’s source file will be executed by all login shells. This requires one to replace alias definitions in $HOME/.bash_alias with $HOME/.bash_profile: