I understand Linux is derived from Unix, just like FreeBSD is too. What about MacOS? Is it still considered a Unix flavour?

Also, Linux has it's own flavours, like Red Hat, CentOS, Slackware, Debian etc. What does FreeBSD have, if anything?

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J de Silva
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I have to be honest when it comes to Mac's I fall way short here. :-?

But I was able to find this link which seems to point to three different version of BSD.

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Thank you PCX, I need the information for a script I am developing.

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J de Silva
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The word "Linux" refers to the kernel developed by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds (now a grand old man at the ripe age of 31, I think), who still controls the fundamental development of Linux. Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, etc. are distributions ("flavours" of Linux in your terminology) that include the kernel and many common UNIX-like utilities (cat, find, awk, sed, dmesg, du, df, etc.), and lots more. The kernel is the operating system: the software that initializes your computer when you boot up and gets it ready to run applications programs. (Or as Alan Kay once said, "The operating system is the program that you have to fight before you get to fight with all of your other programs." Or something like that.)

With Microsoft Windows XP, the line of demarcation between kernel and applications is not so well drawn, and that fact is the basis for lots of ill will and legal proceedings against Microsoft. (Is Internet Explorer part of the operating system or not? Silly question, or permanent bone-in-my-throat, them's-fightin'-words brawl inducer?)

BSD is a different kernel than Linux, and I have no experience with its distributions. You can start here if you are interested.

The differences that I see in the Linux distributions seem to be in three categories:

1. Installation and maintenance: each has its own way of detecting hardware and setting up disk partitions and boot options. Not all have the same file structures. That means that, after installation, if you want to find configuration data for, say Debian, it may not be in the same place that Fedora would put it. Updating to new versions of the kernel and other installed software will be set up differently for the various distributions. (RPM up2date vs. apt-get, for example.) The impact of the differences hasn't seemed terribly important to me as a small system user (I control all of the computers in my network, and I use defaults for practically everything), but could be very important for administration of larger networks. Debian users can use rpm and Fedora users can use apt-get if they want to, but which do you prefer out of the box?

2. Default user interfaces. (Gnome, KDE, or others). If you don't like the look-and-feel of the default window manager, you can change it at installation or later, but I like to see what it looks like out of the box before having to dig into xfree or xorg font documentation to get it looking good to me.
Previous versions of Red Hat distributions had terrible looking default fonts, and I know of several people who dimissed Linux out of hand because it was not very pretty (these were techie-types, too, and the actual most common description was 'butt-ugly'). Real macho-type command-line UNIX veterans dismissed such objections as an indication of the lack of dedication of the current crop of computer users to the god of raw computing power. Current Fedora distributions, with Firefox, openoffice.org, etc. look OK to me (although I usually tweak the default fonts and default font sizes in browser windows and even in command-line shell windows).

3. The number of applications included in the basic installation disks. Most of the programs are GNU or other open-source utilities and applications. You can always get source and compile your own, but if you are using, say Fedora, and you install non-Fedora packages, it sometimes screws up the works when you try to upgrade/update the applications (Don't get me started on the horrors of RPM-dependency hell --- Oh! The humanity!!!) How many CDs are in the distribution: 1, 3, 4, ...?

I could go on forever (and it sometimes seems that I do), but here are a couple of links that I found to be interesting:

distrowatch

differences

librenix

Regards,

Dave

Question:
"What do you get if you put a million monkeys in an office pecking away, more-or-less at random, on computer keyboards?"

Answer:
"A Linux command."