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Differences between Mac OS X and Unix/Linux


fishyeah
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My first experience with Linux was MKLinux DR3 - which ran on top of a mach mikrokernel, and was developed largely with funding from Apple Computer.

 

Some of the prominent Darwin developers (IE David Gatwood) were MKLinux developers before Apple canned Rhapsody and released the Darwin kernel.

 

Linux is not UNIX - just like GNU's Not Unix.

Linux is UNIX like but it is not a descendent from AT&T UNIX like BSD is.

 

It's similar enough to UNIX that it is often referred to as *nix or UN*X.

 

In this day in age - POSIX matters more than whether or not something is a real UNIX or not.

 

OS X is starting to take on many things in common with Linux that it Linux does not have in common with *bsd. For example - when OS X first shipped, it defaulted to the BSD tcsh shell. Now it defaults to GNU bash. Many of the utilities it is now using are GNU utilities opposed to the separate codebase BSD equivalents.

 

In reality - with the exception of some special distributions (IE embedded), Linux is the GNU operating system running the kernel Linus wrote, as GNU never got hurd off the ground (hurd is the kernel GNU wanted to make GNU a free software competitor to UNIX). OS X is still primarily BSD in origins but it has been infected by several aspects of the GNU operating system. So have many of the BSD's - now using GNU's C Compiler, for example, though they are not using glibc.

 

That's why POSIX complians is more important than whether it is a unix or not - it lets things mix and match with minimal effort needed. Source code that is POSIX compliant should build and run on any POSIX compliant system with minimal effort.

 

I believe OS X is fully POSIX compliant.

Linux - I think it depends upon the distro, but I don't think any distro is fully POSIX compliant.

 

Linux tries to be POSIX in many ways but is more concerned about LSB compliance. LSB and POSIX have some conflicts.

http://www.opengroup.org/personal/ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt

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