Difference Betn Linuxes?

[vipul]

Hi Guies i m confused about that much names of linux

i want to know about debian and other linuxes

i dont know what is debian..

pls tell me all other versions of linuxes

[GNUrag]

hello vipul,

Debian is a project which is funded by an independent entity called SPI (Software in Public Interest) . It is a non commercial organization which maintains an excellent 100% Free-as-in-Freedom GNU Linux distribution called Debian GNU/Linux

Debian provides software Free of Cost for 13 processor architectures, and in three development levels unstable, testing and stable . No other commercial Linux distribution vendour can come close to what debian has to offer. And considering the number of mirrors that debian has, It just becomes the best distribution.

[vipul]

Thanx Gnurag To Give Me Reply

But Now U tell Me About FreeBSD.
and Macintosh

[ujjwal]

Neither of them are based around linux, though FreeBSD is very much like Unix (even more so than linux) ...

Anyway, a linux distro contains the linux kernel and a lot of additional software which run on it, like the shell, desktop environment, applications etc. You have many distro's, Redhat, Suse, mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware being some of the popular ones.

Well, as I have not used them all, I dunno the exact differences, but I think this is the general idea (correct me if wrong) -

The first three are pretty similiar, using RPM package management, and using a style of functioning in which all the scripts associated with the runlevel you are using are collected in one directory. Each of these are also commercial linux distros, so you have both paid and free versions.

Debian uses the .deb pakage system, maybe GNURag can tell you more.

Gentoo is a unique one which has a source code based package management. The package dependencies are automatically solved, so ideally you wont have to bother much about taking care of installations.

Slackware is what I use, it doesn't have an elabourate package system, but uses .tgz packages, which is simply a collection of files and installation scripts. It doesn't use dependencies, but you can use a system like slapt-get to update your software or install new packages keeping dependencies in mind. Another way it differs is that it uses a BSD type of initialisation, there is a single script associated with each runlevel, and not a directory. It would probably be a more unixy linux

[GNUrag]

The .deb package managament scheme is based around the wonderful utility called APT... though this APT is in itself based around the BSD ports management scheme which is far more superior than any other pacakage management systems including RPMs and Slacks.

Gentoo also uses BSD like ports managament, which makes it different than other GNU-on-top-of-Linux distributions.

Originally Posted by vipul

But Now U tell Me About FreeBSD.
and Macintosh

For FreeBSD, you may want to visit this page. It shows what FreeBSD is and how it evolved.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html

MacOS is based on the GNU/Darwin operating system. See the apple page for more info. The Darwin kernel is in turn based on the CMU Mach 3.0 Microkernel.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/

And remember, if you are interested in Unix history then look in google and Wikipedia, ... you see, Unix history is very very vast and needs a lot of reading.. It isn't possible for us to write down everything here..