[wescoas1]

So how many of you guys are running it or have experience with it? Any thoughts about it?

:nerd

 

[BuRn__]

i ran fredora core 1 on my laptop last year at college. and i ran SUSE9 on my laptop for a few months till i figured out my wireless pcmcia card isnt compatible :lame so i reformatted and put ::cough:: xphome ::cough:: back on it.

 

[Hagios]

Gentoo, Debian, Slack, SunOS... You name it. But my favorite OS is OpenBSD.

Currently running 1 Gentoo box, one OBSD box, one SunOS box (Sparc20), and an XPPro box as my clientside machine.

Way I see it is, it's like rididng. Doens't matter what you use, so long as your head is on straight.

 

[Oni]

Mandrake 10 and Slackware. Love it.

 

[wct097]

Running Fedora Core 1 on an old IBM Aptiva someone gave me. Put 3 HD's in it and partitioned it so that the system resides on a 2.5gb partition, and I have a second partition of 13gb that I use with SAMBA as a Windows file server. I backup my PC's to it over the network.

 

[ASCI_Blue]

LINUX FUCKING [email protected]!#@[email protected]#[email protected]!$

okay I feel better now. Anyway I'm currently running Gentoo linux and have run a couple versions of Mandrake, Stormix, Debian, Progeny, and a couple others over the past few years.

Only bitch is ATI's piss poor drivers.

 

[pittsv]

Anyone have any experience with Mac OS X? I heard it was based on linux but I haven't heard much anything else besides that.

 

[ASCI_Blue]

Mac OSX is NOT based on linux!!! It's based on UNIX!!! Big difference!!! Burn in Hell for thinking it's based on linux!!!!

 

[BuRn__]

Mac OSX is NOT based on linux!!! It's based on UNIX!!! Big difference!!! Burn in Hell for thinking it's based on linux!!!!

something tells me u might have anger issues

 

[WannaBe]

I have gentoo on my main box right now just to see how it is, slackware on my server and trustix on some other servers.

I am normally a slackware person through and through, but the gentoo compile everything approach is something i really like.

-Chris

 

[Joe Average]

have run mandrake for a while. not using it currently due to not being able to get my wireless connection to work. will once i get that ironed out.

 

[japbike]

ya know, I really try to understand this and want to. But the further into this thread I got, the more lost I became. so all I have to say to that is, blah blah blah, I'm a dirty tramp...

 

[Naughty76]

ya know, I really try to understand this and want to. But the further into this thread I got, the more lost I became. so all I have to say to that is, blah blah blah, I'm a dirty tramp...

HA HA...... I'm with ya there.... well.... accept for the dirty tramp thing. :lame

 

[BuRn__]

Gentoo, Debian, Slack, SunOS... You name it. But my favorite OS is OpenBSD.

Currently running 1 Gentoo box, one OBSD box, one SunOS box (Sparc20), and an XPPro box as my clientside machine.

Way I see it is, it's like rididng. Doens't matter what you use, so long as your head is on straight.

how's Gentoo workin for u? any big issues uve come across with it?

 

[Hagios]

Gentoo rocks. If you compile from Stage 1, you can expect somewhere in the area of 10-50% worth of performance increase, depending on what you're doing.
My MySQL benches were about 30% better from an RPM install from Mandrake of the same version. But again, OpenBSD generally matches the performance of Gentoo, and is more secure generally. Gentoo could almost be a decent client-box, too (Except I have a 9800XT, and ATi's horrible drivers have already been mentioned in this thread)

 

[TheWraith]

i ran fredora core 1 on my laptop last year at college. and i ran SUSE9 on my laptop for a few months till i figured out my wireless pcmcia card isnt compatible :lame so i reformatted and put ::cough:: xphome ::cough:: back on it.

You must have one ODD NIC then because I've yet to see one you can buy off the shelf that wasn't capatible.

 

[viperstrike]

FreeBSD RULES! (another $.02 well spent) No complaints about linux. Works whenever I use it. Too many flavors to list. Don't want to cause a flame war, so i'm just going to say FreeBSD works best for me.

 

[heh2k]

os x is not unix! it's mach.

my current primary machine a tyan k8w thunder (dual sockets) with a single 1.8ghz opteron, 2gigs of ram, sw raid 0 on twin 15k.3 seagates (18gigs each), a 120gig seagate ata drive for bulk storage, and a pos 80gig maxtor for screwing around. my old machine was a dual 883mhz ev67 alpha, up2000+, 2gigs. (i've always been a risc guy, til a bought this opteron - it is FAST).

i also have a 250mhz (iirc) indigo2, a 333mhz ultra5, and a 166mhz pentium for my router. oh yeah, and my 300mhz ibook. and a 133mmx thinkpad.

i almost forgot: debian owns!

 

[TheWraith]

...built off of BSD. OSX is Unix.

The Kernel
Q: I have read that Mac OS X uses the BSD kernel, but I have also read that it uses the Mach kernel. Which is it?

A: The Mach microkernel is the foundation of Mac OS X. (A brief introduction to Mach is available at Stepwise.) Mach provides basic hardware abstraction, memory allocation, process management (including threads), and interprocess communication. But Mach by itself is not a complete kernel. It does not provide device i/o, networking, file system support, high-level APIs suitable for application development, or many other services associated with a full-fledged operating system kernel.

Mach is designed to host these missing services on top of its platform-independent base functionality. The most common source for these services has historically been BSD Unix. The BSD subsystem implements the full set of APIs and services provided by BSD Unix, but it leverages Mach to perform memory allocation, process management, and so on. In an operating system with a real BSD kernel (e.g. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), the BSD kernel does all this heavy lifting itself.

When the BSD subsystem is implemented as a user-level process running on top of Mach, Mach is said to be a "pure microkernel." If the BSD subsystem crashes, Mach will not be affected. Many embedded systems use Mach (or some other microkernel) in this fashion to ensure maximum stability in even the most extreme situations. But pure microkernels have several drawbacks, the biggest of which is the performance hit incurred by the necessary (but computationally expensive) message passing between Mach and the user-level subsystem process.

Most modern desktop and server operating systems (including Windows 2000) use what is often called a "modified microkernel" architecture. Mac OS X does this as well. Instead of running as a user-level process on top of Mach, Mac OS X's BSD subsystem runs in kernel mode in the same address space as Mach itself. Most message passing between Mach and BSD is eliminated in this situation; the BSD subsystem can interact with Mach via normal function calls.

It's important to note that Mach's native kernel interfaces have not been broken by this "incorporation" of the BSD subsystem. They remain just as accessible to other subsystems as they would be in a pure microkernel implementation. This is important in Mac OS X because of the wide variety of subsystems implemented on top of Mach (and, by extension, on top of BSD): Cocoa, Carbon, the Java Virtual Machine, and even Classic.

Yes, this deviation from a pure microkernel means that Mach is vulnerable to BSD subsystem crashes. But if BSD goes down, Mac OS X is basically hosed anyway. There's no point in gloating that "Mach is still running just fine" when the machine is totally unusable (no device i/o, no networking == dead). This type of stability is important in embedded systems, but personal computers are useless without higher level services. And the performance boost from this arrangement is substantial.

As should be clear by this point, although Mach is the "real" kernel doing the low-level heavy-lifting, the overall "flavor" of the Mac OS X kernel is BSD. In Mac OS X, BSD provides the process model (process IDs, signals, and so on), basic security policies such as user IDs and permissions, threading support (POSIX threads), BSD sockets networking, and BSD kernel APIs.

Read that last sentence again, and note that this has nothing to do with a command line, a Unix-like directory structure, programs like "ls", "tar", or "gzip", or any of the other things often associated with BSD. Those things can be removed from Mac OS X without damage, and indeed may not be part of the default install. But "BSD" cannot be removed from Mac OS X any more than Mach can. Every process in Mac OS X is a BSD process. Every file has BSD-style permissions (yes, even on HFS+ volumes). Every thread is, at its core, a POSIX thread.

Summary:
This pervasive BSD flavor may be why there is confusion about Mac OS X being "based on the BSD kernel." It's not; it's based on Mach. But Mach by itself does not a kernel make. The "officially blessed subsystem" running on top of Mach is BSD, but it is not "the BSD kernel." The BSD kernel manages its own memory and processes and does its own hardware abstraction. The BSD subsystem in Mac OS X uses Mach's implementation of these services. Finally, the BSD subsystem exists in the same address space as Mach for performance reasons, but this incorporation does not break any of Mach's modular interfaces.

 

[Hagios]

TheWraith is on the money. Darwin, around which OS X is built, is based on FreeBSD. Pretty nice system, even if it runs kinda slow with all of the graphical flair.