Wut is the difference between Linux and UNIX? This is really stupid as i probably have no clue what I'm talking about, but like UNIX you can chmod stuff. Wut's the difference between Unix and Linux? Like Ikonboard and stuff can work on Linux servers right? is there anything bad about Linux servers? Thx!

Actually, it is a good question. :)

Unix is the base operating system. I'm not exactly sure when it was originally developed or by what company, but there are tons and tons of flavors of it. An example of a flavor of Unix would be Linux. It was developed by a guy named Linus Travolderous (spelling?). It is more "user friendly" (Edit: It was more user friendly at the time it was developed ... there aren't many differences any more) if you want to say that, and it is the primary choice amoung Unix newbies. Some distributors of Linux are RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.

The "chmod" command can be found in every flavor of Unix. All a chmod is doing is giving the permissions on a file. In Windows, to execute a file, you would call it .exe or .bat. In Unix, you can name the file anything you want ... as long as you give it the permissions to execute, it can!

Ikonboard can work on a Linux server. When they say "Unix", they are saying it will work on the different flavors of Unix. And no, there isn't anything bad about Linux servers. There are some things bad about Windows servers, but I won't go into that today ... :)

Originally posted by Disc13
Wut is the difference between Linux and UNIX? This is really stupid as i probably have no clue what I'm talking about, but like UNIX you can chmod stuff. Wut's the difference between Unix and Linux? Like Ikonboard and stuff can work on Linux servers right? is there anything bad about Linux servers? Thx!

Linux is a very UNIX-like operating system. It acts like and works like UNIX. It contains all of the commands you would expect in a UNIX operating system.

Pretty much anything that runs with Perl, PHP, or CGI will run on Linux. In fact most scripts are built on either Linux or BSD.

Take care,

Brian

Linux is just a slight variation of Unix. Just like FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc are variations of Unix.

Linux is not a variant of Unix. It is an operating system that was reverse engineered by Linus Torvalds to function in a manner similar to Unix. For that reason, almost all programs that work under Unix will also work under Linux.

Unix is a licensed operating system sold by a number of different vendors, each with their own variant. Indeed, the motivation for Linus was to have a similar OS but one that would be free of license fees as well as open source. He still controls what changes go into the Linux kernel (the core of the OS).

On a practical level, the biggest difference (or one of the biggest) between the two might be the directory structure.

Thanks for the information!

Aye! Thanks for the clarification Duster!:cool:

Originally posted by Duster
Linux is not a variant of Unix. It is an operating system that was reverse engineered by Linus Torvalds to function in a manner similar to Unix. For that reason, almost all programs that work under Unix will also work under Linux.

Huh. I was always under the impression that he took the source of Minix and only modified parts of it to start Linux. I've never been entirely sure ... are you positive? I'd like to know for sure. :)

BTW: Here is a good image that I found a while back of the history of Unix. 10 points to the person who prints it, tapes it around their wall, and posts a picture. :)

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/history.html

Originally posted by Vincent Paglione
Huh. I was always under the impression that he took the source of Minix and only modified parts of it to start Linux. I've never been entirely sure ... are you positive? I'd like to know for sure. :)
That could very well be true, with the operative word being start. Linus created Linux in stages. By the time he was finished, he had eliminated all traces of Unix and had an OS that was compatible, did not use licensed code (which would be illegal), and was now open source.

Here's a very short history of Linux (not the more detailed one written by Linus I read a few years ago). http://www.linux.org/info/index.html


David,

You're welcome. It is an important distinction, which is why I made it.

Ahhh ... so that explains it. The finished project does not contain the source to other Unix flavors, but he started by coding a Minix clone. Thanks for the clarification.