On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 20:04 +0100, Allister Levi Sanchez wrote: > If you are looking for something closer to the REAL UNIX than > Linux, then > you can go no nearer than NetBSD. If you are looking for > sysvinit, you will > be disappointed, since NetBSD uses BSD init. > > I guess I'm too young to know the difference between Linux and a "REAL > UNIX". Would you care to explain what's the difference? How is it > better than Linux for servers? Can it exceed the comfort that Kubuntu > gives me as a desktop? Hope you could educate me on this :-)
IMHO, maybe what they are referring to as a "REAL UNIX" is more to being a "genetic Unix" - whose lineage is derived from the 1969 AT&T codebase. The BSD's, despite being already purged of AT&T copyrighted code, can lay claim to this as they all trace their lineage from 4.4BSD - a descendant of AT&T Unix. And so far, NetBSD is nearer to how 4.4BSD looked and felt like compared to FreeBSD. All is subjective when it comes to comfort. 1. Some are biased towards BSD-style initialization, while others go for classic AT&T-style init (hopefully Ubuntu's upstart would give fresh air to init in the future). 2. Many are attracted to the simplicity of administration of BSD's more-robust networking stack and stateful packet filter with a more natural language syntax, while others like the bare-metal faster Linux networking stack with the modular, connection-oriented approach that Linux's packet filter gives without resorting to userland tools. 3. In this age where multi-core machines are already becoming the norm, SMP and threading in Linux is still superior compared to the BSD's. But the BSD's are not sleeping at the gates as they're catching up (with ULE and KSE). Then again, you've got better chances with Solaris, or the mxn threading capabilities of HPUX. 4. Linux has a cornucopia of filesystems supported. Linux, like proprietary Unix variants, have supported journaling filesystems for a very long time. The BSD's have a different approach using soft updates on UFS/UFS2, with support for journaling filesystems still a starting effort. 5. Virtualization support is varied between Linux and the BSD's. The BSD's have jails and Xen built-in, while Linux has a near equivalent using OpenVZ, along with built-ins like KVM, Xen, and UML. Proprietary Unix variants like Solaris would have zones (similar in concept to jails and OpenVZ), while the likes of HPUX and AIX have VSE's and LPARs respectively. 6. Linux supports more hardware peripherals and more hardware architectures than the BSD's (even more than NetBSD!), although it's not like how architectures are supported in the BSD's, where all comes from the same code tree. 7. As for desktop comfort - that's also subjective. IMHO the mechanisms found in Linux for device support is already superior (with a user-space hotplug-aware device mapper and inotify). Some, however, are more comfortable with the classic Unix approach compared to the Windows-like approach that udev brings. Some even like CDE as offered by proprietary Unix systems! 8. Probably a lot more to mention. Both the BSD's and Linux have advantages and disadvantages - it's up to the sysadmin's judgment on what to deploy based on their company's needs and applications. -- Paolo Alexis Falcone [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
