Hardware

One promlem that you need to work with on day one is what machines to use when you do the exercises. All exercises are written to be sone on a Linux machine and that might couse some problems if you so not have Ubuntu or similar installed on you laptop. These are the alternatives you have:

• MacOS: If you hava Mac  most of the exercises will work on  MacOS but the systems calls and memory layout sometimes differ. If you know what you're doing it will work but if you don't it will be very confusing.
• Windows:  If you're running Windows the API for most system calls are so different that things will be tough. The results will probably also be very different so running on a Windows machine directly is not really an option.
• Virtual machine: This is the best option if you run MacOSor Windows (and you should try it even if you run a Linux system). It takes some tinkering to get it to work smoothly (setting screen resolution, amount of harddrive etc) but once it is up an running you're fine.
• The computer rooms: Everything will work except for the exercises where you need to be "root" i.e. be a priviliged user that is allowed to modify the kernel. Annother downside is of course that you have to be in the computer rooms and find a free computer.
• Available servers: The school has a number of serveres running Red Hat (a Linux system). You can log in to those from you laptop and run your experiments there. The only restriction is that as with teh computer rooms, you're not root and will not be able to do some experiments. There are also exercises where we stress the computer of file system and this is probably not what the sys-op:s woudl like you to do :-)