Whats the difference between Unix and Linux?

thats the question, Please help thanks.

 

Decent article on BSD vs Linux from January of 2004.

 

Beware of reading web pages comparing Linux and BSD (or other forms of Unix).

Consider this page, which, after spending the entire page promoting BSD and bashing Linux has the audacity to say "Perhaps one of the biggest differences between FreeBSD ans Linux is that of advocacy. FreeBSD Has very little of it by comparison.". Maybe the author was suggesting his page was the foremost BSD advocacy site?

You'll find a lot of "why n00bs use foo, and leet haxxorz use bar". Grain of salt, and all that.

 

Linux is a kernel, but if you're speaking a distro, Linux still doesn't have a GUI built into the kernel (X/XORG/etc.) so Linux can run with a GUI, but so can UNIX (And can be accessible via VNC tunelling.)

 

Here's a good articel

The Linux Kernel is really not to different from Unix, but the project and the goal are entirely different. Unix is meant as a server enviroment and is mostly text based. Linux is open source as oposed to Unix's closed source, that means anyone cna take the source code and modify how they please and release it to the public, as long as the source code is with it. because of this Linux has become something mch greater than a clone. Its become an Entire O/S with Huge capabilities. Gaming is coming up as more driver support arises. Its perfect for Office type stuff using OpenOffice.org. Its the best choice for web servers, you may have heard of the LAMP standard(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). and a million other things im missing including you can run it from a floppy disk, a CD with a GUI, it runs on phones, routers - Linksys for example you can download the source make whatever changes you want and re upload it to your router, including adding SSH server chanign frequencies in wireless etc.

And a lot of other things

 

I wouldn't put it that way at all. Unix is more than a kernel, to be sure, but it's more than a shell. It's a whole OS, it's just the the base install tends to use a command-line interface shell such as sh, csh, or bash.

Windows is an OS. It offers file/disk management, memory management, program execution (the kernel operations) and an user interface (shell) called Explorer.exe in this case. Unix is the same. It can do all those basic tasks. Additionally, Windows and Unix all come with some basic utilities, like networking support and hardware support.

Unix is a fully-fledged OS. Unix can also refer to the entire group of Unix-like operating systems, including those based on Linux, the BSDs, and Mac OS X.

Linux, OTOH, is just the kernel. All Linux can do is process generic instructions, but it offers no default shell, or means to interact with hardware (drivers) other than the basics (RAM, CPU, maybe an IDE HD or FD). All the Linux-based distributions (Mandrake, Fedora, Gentoo, SUSE, Debian, etc.) are actually Linux plus more software to make a functional OS. Because the vast majority of this software comes from the OSS/GPL software group GNU (creators of the GPL, but probably not creators of open liscencing), Linux as an OS is more appropriately called GNU/Linux.

Lots of the GNU utilities are direct ports of the functionality of Unix software (gcc equates to cc, gzip to zip, etc.), but unlike Unix (which is closed source) GNU is all GPL/OSS. Hence tha annoying recursive acronym. GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix. You'll find lots of annying recursive acronyms in the OSS world (RPM, PHP, PINE).

 

But your simple explanation used incorrect terms. Would you like me to refer to turbocharging and fuel injection as "carburetors"?

 

talk about obsessive. damn he needs to get a life outside of magic and computers. and i wonder if herminoe knows he is counting down to her 18th birthday. wierd. i doubt she will make any videos he would want to see.

eric