Are there any freebie unix o/s around to download (PC based) which are pretty close to the "standard" ones and are very good?

ight seem a silly question I just would like to lean unix, however I dont want to learn some freebie software which looks nothing like "standard" unix systems.

btw I know very very little about unix however Im pretty techy in Windows based apps and I know dos etc :P


oh.....id love to multi boot the sysem if thats possible however I dont mind if its not I have a spare 13gb disk (i assume unix isnt that big?)


Thanks for any help


Tils

hugs Tils, hubby just started playing around with UNIX and said that this is where he downloaded stuff from. (at least as far as he could remember)

http://www.psynch.com/library/unix/ (UNIX)

Well ive been told this is pretty good to learn.

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/


Whats the big difference between linux and unix? or they basically the same thing?

Lemme explain my reasons why I want to learn.

I work in IT however I have very little to no knowledge of unix and well im looking for a job atm and want to try to have unix on my CV somewhere (Ive used sco unix before long long time ago) and RS machine unix (IBM i guess).

I just want something very easy to learn...almost unix (or linux) for dummies level hehe.

Tils

Any flavor of *ix will use the same basic command sets, so if you learn Linux, you're just a small leap away from learning BSD or any other specialized *ix software. Most companies will be using a hybrid version of Red Hat, BSD or their own build. Some of the big hardware folks will have their own version, like Sun has Solaris, and SGI has Irix. You can find "versions" of these OSs "out there," but unless you have the specific hardware to run them on, you're probably missing the point anyway.

Just download a copy of Red Hat (last I remember it was free... it's been a long time though) and get O'Reily's "Unix in a Nutshell." That's all you really need unless you start going into stuff like Sendmail.

I think FreeBSD is free too. :) Usually people will bundle together all the stuff and put a kind of packaging software with it and charge for the CD's and stuff. I believe Linux *must* be free simply because of the way the license is. You've just got to handle downloading and building your own CD's yourself.

Heh... sendmail. :)

What Stormie said...our software runs on *ix (HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, AIX, Linux).

Of the pure Unix OS's tho, I'd say Solaris is the most "vanilla" (although their keyboard is goofy - took me forever to migrate from a Solaris keyboard to DOS/Windows keyboard configuration).
But their differences aren't much.

Good idea :)

There are many "Unix" types - Linux is the most popular for desktops, and keeps nibbling away (slowly) at Microsoft's share of the PC. It's got major clout in the server market too.

Certainly it's the most discussed in forums, magazines and emails to software developers saying "please port your software/drivers to..." as it's (according to its inventor) the largest collaberative project in the world.

Linux is mostly famous for the Open Source license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) it's distributed under - the gist is that it must always be distributed with the source code, and any derivations or programs that use its code must be distributed under that same license. Most Linux software is also under that license, therefore the whole operating system revolves around open source.

The general idea is that anyone can see how it and its programs are created and submit improvements and patches or make spinoffs ('forks') of their own (using the GPL license). Especially good for security - millions of eyeballs on one bit of code = more efficient at spotting holes than a small dev team.

Not to forget the idea of choice. Hundreds of distributions, lots of different desktops, about 5 web browsers, about 10 word processing packages...! (all free)

http://www.gnu.org to find out more about the open source philosophy...
http://www.linux.com for general info
http://www.linuxnewbie.org
http://www.linuxiso.org - loadsa downloadable Linux distributions

I'd second Mandrake as the ideal newbie distribution. It has a couple of quirks, but it's great to learn with.

Oh, one more URL...
http://www.transgaming.com - Transgaming WineX. I use this for playing EQ under Linux (it works perfectly - as in indentically to under Windows)

How's the performance of EQ under WineX now?

I find it *equal* to the performance under Windows (seriously!) - my hardware isn't brilliant, either.

Well i decide to DL mandrake and see how it goes then if its too easy il get a harder one :D


Tils

Good idea :D

BTW, the kitty/duckling siggy is kwute.

heres something else that might interest you:


http://www.knoppix.org/

go down to the english section, since i assume you read english, then click on the clickable link Knoppix

its basically, a CD bootable version of GNU/Linux software. it goes through and detects what hardware you have, and goes from there..

i was not able to get this to work on my main system, as i could hear it boot into Xwindows, but could see nothing. sound worked, but not video..

but, i did run this on my notebook, and it worked like a charm.. great thing about this is, set to boot from cd-rom, pop it in, and boot up. dont like what you see? mess something up? reboot.

if i recall, it flagged my HDD as read only, which was fine for while i was dinking with it. once i got tired of that, i got slackware 9.1.

i installed it and am having fun learnign how to do this all as well.

slackware is downloadable as a ISO at: http://www.slackware.com/index.php

hope that helps out as well as all the other good info in this thread

Ya beat me to the Knoppix link Ianwen ;)

I heartily recommend it for playing around though as the CD-boot is perfect for Windows users that just want to learn some of the basics. There are literally hundreds of excellent Unix sites and newsgroups out there are well, most of which are perfect for the beginning *nixer that is familiar with Windows or computers in general. Don't overlook texts either, many are also worthwhile.

In the end though, don't worry overly about flavors. It is not quite the same as learning an IDE or the like, the knowledge is very easily transferable.