is osx a true unix system

I am quite sure that the answer is no because each OS has it's own kernel and it works differently.

A unix OS just means that is is posix compliant (I think), meaning the UI environment is the same (i.e. knowing that cd, ls, cat, and other commands will work at the prompt of each unix machine).

Linux has a a totaly different and independent kernal and it is not derived from system V.

Also the DOS kernal is NOT the NT kernal. DOS, win 3.x and 9x I believe have the same underlying kernal BUT windows NT based OSes (like NT & 2000 ) have a totally different kernal which is compatible with the old kernal in order to run applications.


I am sure someone else exists here to be able to explain it better :)


Admiral
 
powemacuser,

there is no unix kernel. System V would be the last known true unix.

IRIX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, Linux, BSD, etc... has kernals that inherit the characteristics of a Unix kernal. They are not true Unix. I don't even believe a true Unix OS exist anymore.

Linux was built from the ground up by Linus originally as a computer science project (i think). It is no way a Unix kernal, but through the he's he and his followers added a not of characteristics to it that makes it resemble "unix".

OSX also is not true Unix, but like all the other children of Unix, it has the characteristics of it. I would say OSX is the child of NeXt and FreeBSD, and Darwin is it;s older sibling. And Unix would be it's grandparent.

 
Originally posted by RacerX
It is strange, I have worked with NeXT systems for close to 7 years, and I still don't know why they have the second mouse button.
Click to expand...

The reason that all other computer manufacturers have more than one mouse button is no coincidence: Apparently Apple holds a patent for a mouse with one button. Rumor has it that it was a glitch: they meant to patent a mouse, full stop, but since it says 'a pointing device with a button' it was later interpreted as just the one-buttoned mouse.

Don't know if the rumor is true, but I vividly recollect the famous TV ad: Screen one: multi-buttoned mice pushed around by obviously nervous operator hand, lots of error bleeps, fade over to screen two: relaxed mac operator hand gently cruising along, click, click, click; voiceover: 'On a Macintosh it is extremely difficult to press the wrong button' (Anyone out there has a Quicktime clip of that?)

I think that says it all. I have used systems with two and three buttons and I found them distinctively annoying (If I remember rightly, the Sun Sparc system used to throw up a message: 'Please use other button'. Excellent message, considering there are three buttons on their mouse!)


:cool: Long live the single buttoned mouse!

 
Originally posted by strobe
The whole copy+paste routine with mouse buttons is idiotic. You don't need three mouse buttons to do cut+paste without the keyboard, MacOS does it with one (drag+drop text, beat that eunuchs!)
Click to expand...

Drag and drop doesn't seem to work in a terminal though. Middle button copy, paste is fantastic, even if drag+drop worked (which it doesn't seem to) how the hell would it work across multiple workspaces, and as mouse doesn't focus windows in osX how would you drag and drop to a hidden window?

Middle button copy/paste, mouse focus and bring to front, the "front" key and multiple workspaces are my 4 favourite things in Solaris and it's a shame they weren't adopted (at least as an option) in osX.
 
Seems that os x doest have drag and drop capabilities built in. the feature has to be added to each app (coacoa app atleast) by the developer for you to be able to drag and drop text.
 
here's a hands down proof Linux is not UNIX...

quote from:
http://www.linux.org

...
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License , the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. Click on the link below to find out more about the operating system that is causing a revolution in the world of computers
...

Line 1: Linux is a free Unix-type operating system

There... unix-type... NOT unix... quote from the people who use and love Linux.

So let's put this debate to close.

If you doubt me... go to www.linux.org it's smack right there on the front page. Oh I am viewing it now and it is 6/2/2001. 2:05AM. :)

 
Who ever said linux is unix? Linux is just unix comaptible, and they are alike. I beleve this "debate" was about OS X being a unix anyways.
 
Okay, I haven't been following this thread for a while, but where did the Linux debate pop up?

"here's a hands down proof Linux is not UNIX... So let's put this debate to close."

Sounds good to me :D . Everyone, no more talking about Linux, the debate on that is closed. back to Mac OS X :p .
 
Sorry, guys... I wasn't aware that this thread has grown to 6 pages! ack.

The quote was only there because sometime earlier there was a comparision between Unix, OSX, and Linux... It was one of the earlier posts when someone had a friend who said OSX isn't Unix like Linux... etc etc...

It was just a little hard evidence to hel the poor OSX dude to shut the freaken mouth of the Linux-show-it-off. :X

Don't hate me!!!! I love linux myself! lol I hope Linus doesn't seen a swarm of pengium to linch. Sorry Linus... I really love Linux... really, I do! :X

*cough cough* OSX *cough* rocks! *cough*

:X

So how are you guys doing? Linux bashing? Who's linux bashing? What are you talking about? I thought this thread was about OSX????? :->

 
With regards to drag+drop text....

I'm floored that Carbon has better drag+drop text support than Cocoa to this day. Carbon developers typically have to specifically program drag behavior when receiving dragged text clippings if they want to move the cursor to indicate where a drag will be dropped. Apple could make this the default behavior in Cocoa so ALL current Cocoa applications gain this feature without a single 3rd party recompile!

Currently Cocoa apps can accept drags, but they are effectievly a paste wherever the cursor currently is, which is stupid. It wouldn't effect apps like Terminal, but it does for most others.

What will become even more annoying is if Apple implements drag+drop text in Cocoa and do not fix the damned Cocoa text selection behavior so it's mac-like instead of windows-like. Drag+drop text is exceedingly anoying if there is a railing carriage return, even more annoying than cut+paste with a trailing CR.

Quite frankly I don't know what the Cocoa developers at Apple are playing at. They are certainly not on the ball. How long have they had to extend NSFileHandle to support aliases? How long have they had to implement OpenStep on OS X so Cocoa apps behave like mac apps? Are the Cocoa and Carbon developers even on speaking terms?

To be perfectly frank, I'd rather have the Cocoa text selection behavior be fixed than to have OS X perform twice as fast!
 
Originally posted by Click
os X is not truly a unix system due to the mach kernel.
Click to expand...

Your friend is just repeating buzzwords he's heard and doesn't understand what he's talking about. He's heard linux uses a monolithic kernel, and since mac os X doesn't, it isn't unix. Well, that's total bullshit, since linux isn't unix, it's a clone of unix.

Also, to the person who said that scroll wheel mice don't work in carbon apps, my MacAlly iSweetNet mouse scroller does work in Internet Explorer which is a carbonized app. Worked in the version that shipped with X, and the 5.1b1 update.
 
I know this is a bit off topic here, but is really in reply to the posting about DOS and WIndows NT having the same kernel

[by the way, also in reply to that posting - BeOS does not have aUnix kernel. It simply has a POSIX subsystem and has BeOS ports of bash and common command line utilities]

DOS and Windows versions up to 3.1 have the same basic kernel. It was updated (I think DOS 4.0) to take advantage of features in the Intel 286 and especially the 386 processors, but was still essentially 16-bit.

Windows 95, has a 32-bit kernel - so I would assume it was rewritten from scratch - and it has a compatibility layer for 16-bit applications. 98 is probably no different (kernel-wise) than 95

Now Windows NT is a different beast altogether.

It was written from scratch as a multi-user, multi threaded, multi-tasking and multi-processor OS. It is written in layers - which is what lets them support different processor architectures like Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC etc. (although it never really took off on these platforms)

The chief architect (I do not remember his name now) was actually one of the people who had designed VMS in a previous life - and I have heard stories of it's design drawing strongly upon VMS experience (also it's name: W-NT is one letter ahead of VMS, just as Arthur C. Clarke's HAL was one behind IBM)

The core OS was written to be modular - making it possible to support different execution environments and filesystems. Out of the box it has an OS/2 and a 16-bit DOS/Win3.2 subsystem, and support for a POSIX subsystem. As far as I know, these are not in the kernel at all, but is on top of it - as virtual machines, you could say.

A bit of trivia that Not many people know: NT was originally developed at IBM and was going to be the next version of OS/2, not Windows. IBM had collaborated with Microsoft to make it compatible with Windows (3.1 at the time, I think) - and that is why it still has an OS/2 subsystem. Microsoft contributed the WOW (Windows on Windows) susbsystem that allowed 16-bit DOS/Win3.1 applications to run under it.

Anyway, at some point MS took over the project, made some changes, and released it as Windows 3.5 (NT). IBM released their part of it as OS/2 Warp - which included a Windows sub-system and was said to run [16-bit] Windows applications better than real Windows
 
Originally posted by vihung

It was written from scratch as a multi-user, multi threaded, multi-tasking and multi-processor OS. It is written in layers - which is what lets them support different processor architectures like Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC etc. (although it never really took off on these platforms)
Click to expand...

I've got an old NT 4.0 (sp1) package, and it includes a PPC version. I always wondered about that. Anyway, would it work on an apple, or is PPC just for IBM RS/6000 computers?

(not that I would allow such a thing to happen, I purchased NT because it was $.50 for a never-opened windows NT distro, and I thought it would be fun to laugh at....)

As for the "multi-user, multi threaded, multi-tasking and multi-processor OS." part of your message, it sounds like NT is simply a bad implimentation of unix. I mean, I've used NT in an NT enviroment (+500 computers and a few nt servers), and I remember hatting every minute of it. The OS crashed, halted, allowed you to do whatever you wanted to the file system (read nt user control sucks), and allowed one to pretty much monopolize the computer (which was fun to do to the proxy server with simple vb programs.....).

NT is *like* the best of windows combined with the worst unix implimentation I've ever used. I don't see why anyone would even think about using 95, 98, or ME if they could afford windows 2000 or NT.

Of course, I wouldn't even think of using Microsoft word, let alone winblows.....
 
The chief architect (I do not remember his name now) was actually one of the people who had designed VMS in a previous life
Click to expand...
The name of the guy was Dave Cutler... He was hired off Digital together with most of the VMS kernel development team.
There is a book called "Showstopper" by G. Pascal Zachary describing the development of Windows NT, which makes a pretty interesting reading.
Especially the parts about David Cutler not wanting a GUI in Windows NT, and what ideas they took from NeXTStep (like the Registry aka as NetInfo...).

Besides that NT 3.51 was probably the best OS M$ has ever had. At least it was pretty stable (compared to its sucessors). Things started to get really bad when they came up with the idea that it mus be possible to play games on their server OS and allowed user level code to run in the kernel so things would speed up....
 
is an unhappy implementation of VMS, rather than Unix. In fact, it has nothing in common with unix under the hood.

In the olden days, we prefered Ultrix (DEC's rebadged 4.2BSD unix for VAXen) over VMS, because using the latter felt like wearing a straightjacket. In that respect, one of the major advantages was unix minimalistic approach to programming model: you had your 50ish syscalls, rather than hundreds and hundreds of VMS APIs.

VMS did have some advantages in asynchronous completion mailboxes, but this has been taken care of with aio and kqueue available in BSD (FreeBSD at this time, don't know about other BSD's).
 
Originally posted by Kusako

Especially the parts about David Cutler not wanting a GUI in Windows NT, and what ideas they took from NeXTStep (like the Registry aka as NetInfo...).

Besides that NT 3.51 was probably the best OS M$ has ever had. At least it was pretty stable (compared to its sucessors). Things started to get really bad when they came up with the idea that it mus be possible to play games on their server OS and allowed user level code to run in the kernel so things would speed up....
Click to expand...

I did not have much chance to work with NT 3.51, but I have think that the GUI was in user space, and very sluggish - one of the reasons why it had low adoption rates. From NT 4 onwards, they put the GUI in kernel space (and the blue screen of death was born!)

Interestingly, I believe that Apple has done the same with OS X. Possibly for the very same reason - performance. Is there anyone who can confirm (or deny) that it is so?
 
Originally posted by monty




And if you want ridiculous extremes of mouse button-ness, go get a Kensington Expert trackball, which has 10 (yes, TEN) buttons, and a scroll wheel that also has a button. So, if you wanted to, you could call it an 11-button mouse.

Out of the box, OS X recognizes the lower left and right buttons and the scroll wheel. With Kensington's Mouseworks software for X, it recognizes all 11 buttons plus the scroll wheel (in Cocoa apps).

peter
Click to expand...
As for power users if they want a three button mouse, go to to any computer store, buy logitech 3 button with scroll wheel, take off PS/2 adaptor, plug into USB port and OS X recognizes 2 buttons and the scroll wheel automatically. No extra software needed. I did this about a month ago. Note: Carbon apps don't recognize the scroll wheel yet.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by kilowatt


As for the "multi-user, multi threaded, multi-tasking and multi-processor OS."
Click to expand...

I use NT SP5 at work, and I have to agree that NT's multi-user implementation isn't so hot. There seems to be very little segregation of users' files under NT.

On my OS X machine, when I log in under my account, I have my own preferences, wallpaper, Colorsync settings, my own home directory where my files are inaccessible to other users, etc. On an NT machine, if I log in as someone other than myself, I still have access to my e-mail, my files, my settings, everything except (apparently) the desktop settings (wallpaper, icon placement, etc.).

It seems that NT's implementation is about on par with "Multiple Users" under Mac OS 9 (or maybe not quite as good), whereas OS X seems to be set up from the ground up for multiple users, a la Unix or Linux.
Click to expand...
 
One of the nice things about MacOS is it's so organized it lent itself to be turned into a multi-user system with relative ease. Much more than UNIX.

I don't see any ~/bin or ~/etc or ~/lib do I. Oh no, instead we have loads of hidden .files in the home dir and lots of messy 3rd party ways of 'organizing' resource files for users.

Of course this is already unraveling in OS X. Instead of creating frameworks, developers like Troll Tech (bastards) are making .dylib.3.0..whatever.versioning.mess which are supposed to be installed in /usr/lib and who knows where else, not to mention setting a bunch of environment variables so Qt apps can find the friggin resource files!!

HELLO TROLL TECH! Frameworks SOLVE THIS CRAP FOR YOU!!!! (not to mention the users!)

Eunuchs people aren't going to be satisfied until OS X retrogresses 30 years!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top