Very detailed explaination.  Actually Sun's OS is SunOS,
Solaris is an environment that's consist of SunOS + Openwin.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 5:21 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L



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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