On Wed, 22 May 2002, "Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2002, Ely Levy wrote about "Re: GNU/Linux only, !linux ?": > > actualy the name of it is GNU/Hurd and not Hurd :-) > > No, wait! "GNU/Hurd" will be worthless without all the GNU utilities! > Therefore it must be named: GNU/GNU/Hurd The situation is much simpler: the "Hurd" is the suite of user-space programs that implement what is usually, in a UNIX OS, implemented in the kernel: networking, file systems etc. GNU Hurd (notice the lack of a /) is simply specifying which Hurd it is. As there is currently only one, this doesn't give information. There is no such thing as a GNU/Hurd The whole GNU OS is simply GNU (stands for GNU's Not UNIX, much like Pine Is Not Elm is a reference to how Pine replaced elm, this refers to how GNU is a complete UNIX replacement). gnu-0.2 has been released, and its "kernel" was Hurd much like its fileutils were GNU file utils. I would not recommend using it, it is quite old by now. GNU/Linux refers to the popular variant of the GNU operating system which uses Linux as its kernel. This is the kind of things Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian are selling. It is sometimes called, by mistake or by mischief, just "Linux". Currently, the GNU project is not planning any releases of the GNU OS for the forseeable future. If you want to get a system which is quite close to the GNU OS, there is Debian GNU/Hurd. However, this is Debian, not GNU. Naturally, it uses the GNU os, and in this case, also the GNU kernel. I suppose that if there was a popular alternative version of fileutils, Debian could release Debian GNU/fileutils to mark that it is using GNU's fileutils. Some differences in the Debian system: all utilities have manpages, executables are stripped and not compiled with debugging information. There are hopes (IMO, misguided) that Debian GNU/Hurd will be GNU. There is a likely possiblility that when Debian GNU/Hurd comes out, GNU will release its variant, which could be called GNU/Debian GNU/Hurd, or just "GNU". Or maybe not, my crystal ball seems broken today. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
