OK. my reply was a little excited last night. so lets make it an intelligent conversation instead of an argument, or an unintelligible my-OS-is-better-than-your-OS flame war.
I thought there were two different kernels out there since all of the kernels I compiled on my PC specifically asked which 386 chip I had at the very begining of the compilation.
well i have only been using linux for 3 or 4 years, so i m a little new. i ll bet that in the early days of linux/ppc, there were seperate trees. but right now, linux/ppc (as well as all other architectures) get merged into the main tree. one can download the main tree from
www.kernel.org and compile it on a PPC machine. i am quite sure: i have done just this myself. when you begin the configuration of the kernel, it does seem to be specific to your architecture. when you make config on a PC, it asks you what kind of chip you have, giving you choices for pentiums and AMDs and such, whereas when you do it on a mac, you get choices for various PPC chips. a lot of the make config options are specific to your architecture. This is not due to the fact that you are using a different kernel. it is because when you compile the kernel, it detects what architecture you are on, and gives you options accordingly.
As for OSX not being Posix compliant. Are sure about this? I thought I read somewhere on Apple that it was. It has to be closer to POSIX compliance than BeOSS, and they claimed they were partly POSIX compliant.
check out
apple s website. it claims support for most POSIX APIs. so OSX is fairly POSIX. i don t know to what extent most implies, but i get the impression that they aren t really trying for full compliance. it has been discussed before on these boards, and i based my statement mostly on those discussions. the point that i want to make is that if compliance with UNIX standards is the criterion an OS should meet if it wants to be called UNIX, then OSX is close, but not quite it. and yes, it is definitely much more UNIX than BeOS. i still think something should have to be genetically related to ATTs original UNIX to be called UNIX. there are hundreds or more OSes that are descended from ATT or BSD UNIX, and they legally licensed the code. in my mind only those are UNIX.
if you want to say UN*X or unixen, or *nix, to include any UNIX plus linux plus darwin plus HURD plus the {FreeBSD OpenBSD NetBSD}, then i fully support that and even agree with you. we should have a term for that kind of OS.
You are correct. Linux software may not compile under Darwin right out of the box. This is due to library differences between BSD and Linux. But there is a lot of software that requires libraries specific to 386 PCs and would still not compile under LinuxPPC.
I know of no libraries off hand that compile for linux/x86 but not linux/ppc. i m not saying that there are any, but in theory there shouldn t be. most libraries rely on your kernel headers and other libraries. most things rely on the GNU C library glibc. that works fine on all linux/ppc, and does not work at all on darwin. so any software that relies on glibc will compile easily for linux/ppc, and will have to be ported if it is to compile on darwin.
in theory, all interaction with hardware is done by the kernel, so every other piece of software in the OS does not care what architecture you use.
In theory. so again, i claim that any software that you want to use for linux/x86 will work for linux/ppc.
i should point out that there is a fair amount of linux software these days that is being sold commercially, and released in binary format. this is almost always x86 binary, meaning that it won t work on linux/ppc. i am only talking about open source software that you compile yourself.
of course, compiling all your software yourself can get to be quite a pain in the ass, its easier if you re using redhat and you just rpm a package. that is harder with ppc architecture, because redhat/ppc does not exist. YDL uses rpms, but slashdot just had a great article about the annoying fragmentation in RPMs. anyway... i digress.
finally, let me say that, yes, buc, i do like linux. i find it much preferable to windows when i m using a PC. it has a lot of features, and it is fun to play with. however, OSX is my favorite OS of all time. i use it all the time. i do have a linux partition on my mac, but i have found that none of the linux distros are as advanced on the mac, support for apple hardware in the kernel is always lagging about a year behind support for PC hardware, the darwin kernel has preemptive multitasking, which linux doesn t, and of course darwin supports all my firewire stuff, my scanners and cameras and hard drives, without any trouble, with no recompiling the kernel (actually i did recompile the kernel to get IPv6. and mostly just for the fun of it. but i appreciate the fact that i don t have to recompile the kernel. it can be quite a daunting task at first). so on the apple hardware, i much prefer OSX.
so i am not going to tell xaqintosh to migrate to linux because it is a better OS. it is not. OSX is the best OS ever. but if he wants compatibility with linux software, then darwin just can t hold a candle to linux/ppc.
A question I can answer. First off, #5 Linux is UNIX, and so is Mac OS X (at the core) so you don't have to worry about choosing. 
