This is mostly academic meaning it is useless. It is only for conversational purposes or to win an argument.
But rarely you will get a chance to apply this knowledge too. So to repeat UNIX is not dead. UNIX is not an OS. It is an idea, a philosophy, a way of thinking and a bunch of implementations, toolsets, shell, kernel and so on. Linux is different from UNIX but Linux is not a form of UNIX. It was derived from UNIX. Today also UNIX is live and kicking in several forms though it is not popular amongst the LUG community because most people in LUG are beginners. People who only know popular software. So UNIX is also used in several places both in the form of appliances, network devices, NAS boxes and so on. FreeBSD is a common derivative of UNIX. In the case of Linux, there is the concept of a separate kernel, a separate userland, GNU toolsets, distributions and so on. RPM, Deb packages etc. are a strictly Linux thing. In the case of UNIX there is no idea of a kernel being pluggable into a userland. If you say UNIX it means kernel,userland packaged together as the base system. Usually this also has a mail server, web server, ftp server, make, gcc,sh,ksh and so on. Only in the case of Linux you can separate the kernel or OS drivers and hardware management from the shell and rest of userland which is built with GNU tools. And a distribution has the responsibility of putting these two together to make a meaningful OS. In the case of UNIX no such need exists. A UNIX OS is completely usable. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
