People think that OpenBSD is another Linux.
Such basic things are not known to many since most of the crowd here
are beginners and opposed to
their knowledge of the latest Vijay dance or cricket record nobody
seems to care to know
the trivia about technology.
It is not a hep topic to discuss amongst friends. So this is usually not learnt.
Anyway I will try to clarify it based on what I know. I could be wrong
in certain things but
it will still help some.
Basically the very first UNIX OS was written by the authors of C. They
wrote C to write UNIX.
This had two variants, Chocolate chips and Yankee doodle.
One was AT and T and other was BSD.
It was then bought by Novell, then made free and so on.
Some politics was involved in this.
All of you know that Linux was born in 1993 I think and that Linus
Torvalds a student in Finland
wrote it.
UNIX had its beginnings in early 70s I think.
Then Jordan K Hubbard put in lot of efforts in creating FreeBSD. That
was the first BSD I think.
Along the same lines NetBSD was born and Theo, the creator of OpenBSD
was suddenly fired
from the NetBSD core team because he was not a people guy. He was
more interested in
code quality and other political minded souls in the team disliked
him or even was jealous of him.
Then Theo floated OpenBSD sometime before Linux I think and he has
managed to bring about
a culture of technical correctness and top class technical quality
attracting the best minds.
Around the time Novell had UNIX, Digital corporation released what is
known as DEC UNIX.
Then Sun released Solaris. I have worked a lot in Solaris.
Then you also have other commercial UNIX products - IBM AIX and HP UX.
In today's world we have:
Commercial UNIX:
HP UX
IBM AIX
Sun Solaris
Free UNIX
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
DragonflyBSD
I dunno about the status of DragonFlyBSD. I have never used it.
But I do know a lot of people use FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
The fact that OpenBSD is being recognized as a solid OS is helping me
earn money since
I get business from my open source LiveUSB and LiveCD projects.
So slowly the quality is becoming popular amongst masses.
As to Linux, people think that it is superior to UNIX. It is not true.
It is superior to commercial UNIX,yes.
But free UNIX OSes have caught up with the latest innovation and they
are quite advanced.
There is no concept of distros or distributions in the UNIX world.
Linux is a kernel, you have GNU userland and you create an OS in different ways.
This is why you have various distributions like Slackware,
debian,Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, Redhat.
But in the case of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD the entire OS is
maintained by the team.
Which is the userland, kernel, the packages or ports.
So every POSIX OS can be broken down into:
1) kernel
2) Base system(userland which is shells and few utilities) that are
installed as
part of the base install. This includes the libc library, /etc/ files and so on
3) Packages which are optional add ons to work according to the taste of the
person using or the application for which UNIX Is installed
The packaging system is named differently and used differently by each
distribution in the Linux
world and each OS in the rest of UNIX landscape.
Essentially each package is a tar zip file with some specification
with it and dependency statements.
rpm, deb and so on are examples.
In the *BSD world you usually only have tar.gz files.
In the Windows world if you wish to use UNIX commands then there are a
few choices today.
MingW and Cygwin are the most prominent.
These are not OSes.They emulate the POSIX system calls and run fork()
over Windows threads.
Today you also have various methods by which you can get familiarity
with various free UNIX OSes.
You can run it inside VirtualBox, VMWare player or qemu.
You also have several LiveCDs which do not even touch your hard disk.
This is the general overview of the UNIX world.
For you to become fairly familiar with all this you need to love this
and learn this with interest,
not for getting a job or getting higher salary but to really enjoy this.
There are plenty of enjoyments in the UNIX world.
They don't crash like certain Windows OSes. They are completely free
of cost and
they give you lot of power and control.
And of course with some initial pain you will start understanding the
benefits of running UNIX.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com