[Lilux-help] FreeBSD, compile from source and Distributions

[Patrick Kaell]

> I've had some Unix exposure at work with AIX, and I wanted to have Unix 
> at home to learn more about it.

What about Solaris x86? Sun and AT&T (the creator of UNIX) cooperated in 
the early 90's. As a result, Solaris is THE Unix implemention for those 
who want to learn a real Unix. Solaris 8 is free (but only as in beer, 
not speech). But recently Sun has had the intention to open source it.

AIX is a wonderful and advanced OS. But it isn't original Unix (ODM, 
subsytem resource manager etc., printing system, etc). From the source 
code AIX is a direct descendant of original Unix. Linux is a 
reimplementation of Unix, has no common source code with Unix (ok I know 
SCO says otherwise), but in the end Linux is closer to Unix than AIX is. 
But IBM has worked hard to make the new AIX 5 closer to Linux and System V.

Remember that Linus Torvalds has used the Solaris documentation as a 
guideline to implement the Linux API, because he hadn't access to the 
documents of the POSIX standard in the early days.

Patrick Kaell