Operating system

Roughly speaking, a computer consists of two parts, of hardware and software, with hardware being the “hard” or the physical part, which is essentially unchangeable, and the software, the computer's programming, which is much more flexible.

As a matter of fact, a computer could be used to run one single program only, but usually, a machine is desired to utilize a number of programs, programs like text-editors, webbrowsers, or games. An operating system now is a program that allows all those programs to run together on the same machine, the usual function of that operating system being to deal with the specific hardware components of the respective machine and to provide unified interfaces (access to files and directories, to mouse and keyboard, to sound and screen, to the network,…) to its programs, where each operating system has certain characteristics and standards in doing so.

This is also the reason why programs have to be specifically written for one operating system, and are (in general) not able to run on another system without modification. Operating systems Tremulous is known to run on are Windows, Linux and MacOS X, each with its own respective installer available in the Files-section on tremulous.net.