On 2012-01-05, Gunner Asch wrote:
On Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:07:13 -0600, The Daring Dufas
wrote:
On 1/4/2012 11:00 PM, Gunner Asch wrote:
[ ... ]
If you havent run Linux in years and are basing your opinion on stuff 2
or more years older...evolution has been very very fast. Seriously.
Nothing is the same as it was 2 or more years ago.
Try it, putter with it. I think you will learn to like it a lot.
Indeed so.
[ ... ]
You should take a look at PC-BSD. It ran on everything "PC based" I
tried it on. It's quite bullet proof too.
http://www.pcbsd.org/
And I tend to prefer OpenBSD -- but because it is *less*
Windows-like. It concentrates on security, so I use it for systems
which are exposed to outside -- and for building a firewall, and other
systems are used from behind the firewall.
http://www.openbsd.com
or
http://www.openbsd.org (they are both the same system. :-)
[ ... ]
Ayup..Its good stuff by all accounts. I had a multi cd version of
something BD 10 yrs ago..and never played with it. Didnt seem to have
as many different versions so Ive just not gotten around to it..but I
hear good things about it.
Isnt it more Unix ? Or something all together different?
Warning -- what follows may be a lot more than you wanted to
know. :-)
Well ... by real standards, linux is a unix as well. But the
life history of unix (or the family tree, if you prefer) is strange.
It started in the depths of AT&T, and had gotten up to "Version
6" before it escaped much. Universities got the source license, and
started working with it, adding to it. Version 7 was more widely
distributed -- often with licenses without source.
One university in particular, University of California at
Berkeley, did a *lot* of development, adding things to the utilities and
the kernel. It eventually grew to be its own flavor of unix, called
"BSD" (Berkeley Software Distribution). And the earliest which I have
seen mention of are in the 2.x versions.
Among other things BSD had the first screen based editor "vi"
(spelled out, not pronounced "vie" or "six". :-) Before that, all
editors were line editors.
Then AT&T started releasing a commercial version of unix, called
"System III" (skipping over the 2 that BSD was using). BSD then skipped
over 3, and went to 4.x, and AT&T to "System V".
But distribution of BSD was hampered by it having some AT&T
copyrighted code in it, so you had to have a license from AT&T to run
the free OS from BSD. This finally ended with BSD 4.6 (fully AT&T
free), about the time that the university got out of the OS game
entirely. But this free code became the parent of all the free and open
source BSD flavors around the world.
Somewhere around this time, AT&T started playing with a new OS
called "Plan 9", and may still be doing that internally. But they sold
the rights to unix to -- who was it now? But that company eventually
sold the rights to unix to SCO (Santa Cruz Organization), which
proceeded to sue everyone with a unix like OS for licensing fees. They
were finally shut down.
In the meanwhile, linux was started by Linus Thorvalds, which
was written from scratch to work like unix, but to not have a single
line of AT&T copyrighted code init. (He may have started from another
minimal unix kernel written by someone to use as a tool for teaching OS
programming -- called Minux (or was that Minix?). Linux got hit by the
SCO lawsuit along with anything else unix like.
The oldest examples I have of the various ones is v7 unix on
a Motorola MC68000 CPU, BSD 4.2 on a National Semiconductor CPU and made
by Tektronix, and SysVr2 on an AT&T Unix-PC/7300/3B1 (again Motorola
MC68010 this time.)
So -- in the legal sense, linux is not unix, in that it has no
history from AT&T's code. BSD is now also not unix, because it rewrote
all the code which was AT&T, so only the SysV systems are really still
unix, though they have absorbed many features of BSD. I'm still using
Sun workstations running Solaris 10 as an example of that. (Sun was
running a BSD based unix until their version of SunOs 4.1.4, and then
they switched to SunOs 5.x (called Solaris 2.x). Solaris has a directory
of binaries in /usr/ucb, and if you put that in your search path before
/usr/bin, you will get more of a BSD feel in the OS. "ucb" stands for
"University of California, Berkeley", FWIW.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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