UB University of Baltimore
Merrick School of Business

Operating Systems

Mini-project 2: Treasure hunting in Linux

This mini-projects are due on Sundays by 11 PM.
Go to the MISLAB. Select Linux in the boot login in the machine corresponding to your group, as announced in class. Log in your group machine using groupxx as your username and password. Each group has only one account in the machine. This account has root privileges using sudo, but you will not need root privileges in this project.

Note: you are supposed to customize Fedora distribution of Linux to use KDE as your desktop environment. If you have not done so, follow this assignment/tutorial from INSS315, items A 1-A13.

  1. Change the background of your desktop and setup a screensaver using the Control Center.

  2. Open a terminal window using the KDE toolbar clicking on its symbol and change the password for the group account. Type passwd and the process will start.

  3. Type top in the shell prompt and write in a file using Kedit : (a) what percentage of the CPU is idle, (b) what is the total, shared and free memory space (if you would like to check these numbers you can also type free at the shell prompt), (c) what is the size of the swap file and how much was used?, and (d) select a process in which you are the user and write its PID, size, status (S = sleeping, R = running), CPU and memory used (you can also use ps -aux to see this information). Note: to stop top press Control-C . Use Ksnapshot to capture what you did.

  4. Open another shell window and type kpm. Compare the results you obtained with top and kpm.Type ksysguard. It has more information than kpm. Compare it with Windows Task Manager.

  5. Type kinfocenter in a shell prompt and find what version of X Windows is your machine running, what card(s) it has, total memory, physical and swap (show me), what type of CPU and its speed.

  6. Type /sbin/ifconfig in a shell prompt and find the MAC and IP address of your machine.

  7. Select KDiskfree from System Tools after clicking on the RedHat in the toolbar. What disk space is free and where?

  8. Type ls -al in a shell prompt and get a list of all files in your directory, including file types, ownership, permissions and size. Read (explain this list) for at least three different files of each different file type. Redirect the output to a file.

  9. Open a File Manager window and customize it to show files in tree view and also show hidden files, as shown in this example.

  10. Navigate the file manager using the mouse and go to /usr/bin and see who owns and who can read and run (execute) gimp. Who can execute most programs in this directory? Then go to /etc/X11/xdm and see who can run GiveConsole and xdm-config. Create a text file using Kedit and write what you saw.

    11. Finally, open OpenOffice Writer and create your report, including all the answers, images you captured, etc, saving it in a MS Word compatible format.

Submitting the report

  • Open Firefox in Linux, and post your group project report in the Mini-project 2 entry of the Assignments folder of one of the group members in WebTycho.
  • Use Ksnapshot to capture some of the screens you saw as result of the above assignment items. Include the images in the final report.
  • You should submit just one file per group in MS Word format. Use OpenOffice to write your report and save it in word format.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu This page was last updated on January 24, 2007. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.