(Linux != UNIX) (Was Re: OT HP Vectra Networking)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Tue Dec 8 11:13:48 1998

At 09:39 PM 12/7/98 -0500, Max (in a male persona :-) wrote:
>I mean UNIX in general. I consider Linux and UNIX to be similar enough to
>say that what I am running right now is as directly descended from
>something that ran 30 years ago on that PDP in Bell Labs (IIRC) as any
>other version of UNIX.

Linux isn't UNIX, and it doesn't have its roots in UNIX any more than, say
CP/M. Linus liked MINIX (which is Tannebaum's version of an operating
system that uses many UNIX concepts) but wanted to make it better and did
so, as a model of things he would like it to do he used SunOS (which by
that time was the SystemV/BSD hybrid that was about as UNIX-like as Mach).
There are also some great archived flame wars between Linus and Andrew.
FreeBSD on the other hand is derived from BSD 4.4, which was derived from
BSD 4.x which was derived from Version 7 which goes back to the PDP-11 in
Bell Labs. It _IS_ UNIX with the proprietary bits excised over a period of
years. It, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and BSDI are all "true" UNIXes, if you care to
be a purist.

Then there are the OSes RTEMS and uCOS, both of which run on x86 machines.

--Chuck
Received on Tue Dec 08 1998 - 11:13:48 GMT