What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

BSD is descended from Unix, while Linux was written as a lookalike of Unix. BSD and Linux use different kernels and package ...

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That ...

Back on September 12, fellow blogger Marc Wagner wrote a long rebuttal to my comment that the Linux community should stop trying to make Linux look like Windows and just let Linux be Linux. As part of ...

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

A lot of new users come to Linux because they dislike aspects of Windows. That's fine, but trying to recreate the old Windows ...

As chief executive of Caldera International, Ransom Love is on the forefront of developing open-source software for business computing. In a question-and-answer session, he describes his vision of ...

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...