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ok. dumb question. what the hell is linux? i have seen the name popping up all over the town and i simply have no idea what it is. does somebody care to enlighten me? please don't give me the response i got elsewhere which was "if you don't know, don't ask", what a cop out!
thanks kind people.
No, FreeBSD is hell - GNU/Linux is hell frozen over. :D
Seriously though, there is a reasonable summary
and faq here though sadly it makes the error of confusing the kernel, Linux with the operating system, GNU/Linux and with an erroneous justification.
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In simple terms, Linux is an operating system like Windows 95,98,2000,XP.
If you dont know what an operating system is, then i suggest you take some basic computing classes because thats a bit hard to explain properly in simple terms.
What you may be confused about is the kernel and the distributions.
In not so simple terms Linux is the kernel found at kernel.org. Pretty useless by itself so it gets distributed with other useful applications so that you can actually do something. Now comes the different types of Linux Distributions such as RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware etc...
The differences between these distributions are the way the apps that come with them are configured because Linux people are obsessed with configuring every little thing just the way they want it.Hope that helps
Money not an issue?
Where do you live and when are you not home?
I'm not gonna rob you, I'm just gonna steal some stuff
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The various Linux distributions also have 1 other difference between them. Some are modeled after System V unix while some are modeled after the BSD version of unix. Slackware is System V while some of the others are BSD. Depending on which one you get will determine how the Linux system will be configured.
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i see...........
well 'operating system' would have been enough but thanks for sharing your knowledge, now i'm gonna go find some other newbs and show off to them :)
you all lost me at the end there but i get it now, thanks again.
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See! Look what you people have done.
So there goes another person to tell his friends what a cool "OS" Linux is.Thats the problem with us people, we create sucha mess - we try to explain it in simple terms and the newbie ends up misinformed.
There are 10 kinds of people, those who count in binary and those who don't.
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If you got yourself a fast internet connection go find yourself Knoppix, SuSE 9.1 live, or Slax, etc.. some kind of live cd of linux to try out. Linux is free and worth a try. The versions above run only from your cd rom and ram so no install is necessary.
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hey everyone!
thanks a lot for all your help, i appreciate that. i'm glad i asked about this here because my responses have, up to this point, been rather evasive and i started to wonder if anyone really knows what it is. but you guys know, and so do i now so thanks again!
chris.The first step to wisdom is being able to admit when you don't know.
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"...Slackware is System V while some of the others are BSD..."
FYI it's the other way round as slackware uses BSD init (although it can also be made compatible with SysV too)
You can think of linux as being the kernel which sits between the OS and the hardware, just like the kernel in windoze. As said before, by itself it is pretty much useless. That's where the GNU bits come in (stands for GNU's not Unix). The basic programs like cp (copy), ls (dir) and fdisk that actually perform the functions and are not part of the kernel. Think of this a little like DOS behind windoze....which brings me onto distributions (aka distros). Although they appear very much different, windoze 3.1, 95 and 98 etc all sit on top of DOS and provide collections of applications and a graphical interface....very much like comparing the different GNU/Linux distros like redhat, mandrake and suse.
The slight misunderstandings some users have comes from the fact that the term "linux" is wrongly used to refer to the whole distro....even on the menu for this forum, I don't think the "linux forum" will only deal with questions regarding the kernel!
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