I will be taking a Linux operating system class for microcomputers in the fall, what aspects of the linux kernel are important areas os study,
should i also focus on the basic commands of the operating system ?
Give me some pointers..

Focus on understanding the fundamentals of the OS first and foremost. You will have to "un-learn" some habits that a Windows OS has built into you. For instance, Linux does basically nothing with file extensions and determines a file type by the contents of the file itself. In Linux every single thing is a file, including process and memory usage info as well as hard drives and other devices. This is drastically different from the way Windows handles these tasks.

Read a few intro books like the one at www.linuxcommand.org to help understand these fundamentals before you start looking into the kernel.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thank you I never knew everyting in Linux was a file, Thax.

You would basically go off the subject titles in your course.
If you are really learning the OS, you WILL need to be familiar with the cmd line.

Here are some useful links
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
www.linuxtopia.org

If you can come back with some specific qns, we will be able to help you in detail.
Also, as soon as you can, add your Linux distribution+version to your profile, as this may affect some answers.
www.distrowatch.com

1 members found this post helpful.

It depends; what it depends on is the objective for studying the Linux kernel (or whatever of Linux you will study):

• if you want to to study operating system architecture, then studying how memory is dealt with and scheduling will be of interest; you'll probably be comparing Linux with how things are on other OSes
• possibly, this is part of a study of, eg, networking (...or databases, or security, or applications, or programming, or system admin...) and then the command line interface could easily be relevant (but isn't Linux)
• if, you just want to use Linux (eg, use a Linux distro, for the kind of stuff that people normally do with computers), the kernel will be nearly irrelevant as will the command line

I'm not sure that the OS itself has any basic commands that you can study to any effect, but if you mean commands that you can use at the command line, they would (usually) be Bash commands. Certainly, if you are intending doing various system admin tasks or simple scripting (or, even, complex scripting) Bash is a good place to start, although there are other options.

In a way, urls are pointers, and pointers point to things, pointedly