vijay chopra wrote:
First I've never heard (or seen written) GNU/OpenSolaris before today,
I posted a link to just such a thing a few days ago - http://www.nexenta.org/os which is a very usable OS consisting essentially of the userland of Debian/Ubuntu atop the excellent OpenSolaris kernel. I probably wouldn't use it as a desktop just yet, but a lot of that is to do with closed hardware rather than any real problem with the distribution itself.
neither have I seen GNU/*BSD (has anyone applied the GNU toolset to the BSD kernel, and who survived the ensuing licence flame war) . It's
FreeBSD, at least, packages a batload of GNU software, including, but not limited to, GCC and friends. I'm not sure if it's even really possible to have a GNU-free FreeBSD box without significant effort. Certainly if one wants to install anything at all in the canonical way via ports, one will end up with GCC at the very least.
certainly not in common usage even when referring to those operating systems. Secondly the reverse is also true, I could take much of the the GNU toolset and replace them whilst still running a Linux system. Does this mean that if, for example I dropped the switched the GNU toolset for the BSD one, I'd have to call the resulting system BSD/Linux??
Despite all of my nitpicking above, I'm broadly in agreement with you. It seems perfectly fair to me to denote an OS installation by the kernel it runs, as a shorthand - it's not a full specification of the system but what short of a complete list of package names and versions would be?
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