* Slackware is
the most UNIXish Linux distro around (I have experience
with Solaris, SunOS, AIX, Tru64, HP/UX and *BSD). The init system is
an enhanced BSD style init with support for SYSV init scripts for
compatibility reasons. The only other Linux distro which uses BSD
style init scripts is Gentoo.
... and I thought that *BSD was more 'unix-like' than any Linux
distribution, because it has been around long before Linux started to
exist ?!
You are right. BSD is more UNIXish than any Linux distro around (did I
say otherwise?).
BSD was never a 'clean room' reemplementation of Unix like Linux, but a
series of gradual modifications. After 20 years of modifications, the
BSD kernel didn't contain much AT&T code anymore. Thus the BSD people
decided to distribute BSD freely without the AT&T license. FreeBSD
appeared and based on 4.3BSD. However the Unix owner of that time
(Novell) did a court case against the university of Berkeley. After
settlement, Berkeley had to remove some code from the BSD kernel and a
new version 4.4BSD appeared. This was a difficult time (around 1993) for
the FreeBSD people, because the new kernel was missing code and wasn't
functional anymore. They had to rewrite the missing parts. In the user
space BSD contained utilities like awk and tar which were almost
unmodified AT&T code (Berkeley concentrated on kernel development and
some utilities remained mostly unchanged). These utilities were replaced
by their GNU counterparts in the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD systems.
Today, *BSD and Linux are free Unix compatible systems, free of Unix
copyrights and Unix code (whatever SCO says!).
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD also contain many System V APIs (like System
V IPC (shared memory, semaphores and messages)), so the difference
between *BSD and Linux isn't so great as some people makes one believe!
Linux perhaps contains more GNUishms than *BSD. Thats all. The free *BSD
systems even are compiled by GNU gcc! So we nearly could speak of
GNU/FreeBSD. However, the free *BSD system aren't based on GNU glibc,
contain their own version of 'ls', 'ps', etc. and don't ship with
the
GNU bash as standard. But I always install the GNU version of 'ls' on my
*BSD systems because of the colours ;-)
Patrick Kaell
