RE: Unix research source ???

The word "Unix" is a trademark, but it gets used in a generic manner much like the word "Band-Aid" is used to refer to any kind of plastic bandage, or the way "Jell-O" gets used to refer to any kind of flavored gelatin. It was originally owned by Bell Labs. It has bounced around a little bit -- Novell owned it for a while.

So you see IBM's OS called AIX, not Unix. And you see Sun's OS called Solaris, not Unix. And you see HP's OS called HPUX, not Unix ... except now HP also has Tru64 ->UNIX<- (OY!). So, I guess we all know who eventually ended up owning the Unix trademark (as far as I know).

Any OS that comes with the same set of utilities and, on the surface, looks like Unix, gets called Unix by non-sys admin users, even though there is only one vendor that can legally call its OS Unix. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and Linux are NOT Unix; and you're not likely to see an experienced sys admin call them Unix. These other OS's have their own source code for their kernels. They come with, more or less, the same set of utilities, and the non-sys admin users interact with them in a similar manner but, under the covers, they are not the same, and they are not Unix.

You might see some references to System V (Roman number 5) versus BSD (Berkeley). As a user, the only real affect this has is in which bundled utilities you get, in which directory they are located, and the differences in how the utilities work. For example on a pure BSD system you show the processes on a box with "ps aux"; on pure System V (you usually see it as SVr4) you run "ps -ef"; and you get different output. Some OS's will have a ps command that supports either syntax. And some OS's will have a Sys V version of the command in one directory and a BSD version of the command in another directory. What you, the user, are seeing and interacting with is not the OS, but the shell and the bundled utilities. When you are among snotty techno-geeks, keep that distinction clear and save yourself from some ridicule.

For a metalink-like site: Sun has its SunSolve site (http://sunsolve.sun.com). Sun used to (and I would guess still does) periodically send out a CD to customers who contracted for support with much of the SunSolve stuff on it. Remember that the OS is distinct from all the utilities that get bundled with the OS, and these sites are there primarily to deal with the OS, not the bundled utilities.

> -----Original Message-----
>
> Does Unix has an on-line research source, like
> metalink for Oracle? Pls send me the links. Much
> appreciated.
>
> Also is Linux pretty similar to Unix. What's the
> major difference?
>

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