Celeron

Nikolas Britton nikolas.britton at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 17:13:02 GMT 2005


On 6/13/05, Andreas Davour <ante at update.uu.se> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> 
> > On 6/7/05, Nosehouse <nosehouse at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Hello FreeBSD :D
> >> A question and I'm out: I have an old pc, running on a 300 MHz Intel Celeron CPU, on an Intel MOBO. Now, what platform should I choose from your site: Alpha, i386? And also for and AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with an Asus A7V600-X, what distribution?
> >> Thanks!
> >>
> >>
> >
> > FreeBSD is an operating system, Linux is a distribution.
> 
> Nope. Linux is an operating system kernel, as is FreeBSD. The latter
> also happens to be the name of the operating environment.
> 
> SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux or Debian GNU/Linux is distributions.

When I say "operating system" I mean a "complete system". What good is
a kernel if you have no way to make it do something?

Windows  = Kernel + GUI + System tools + User tools
OS-X = Kernel + GUI + System tools + User tools
FreeBSD = Kernel + CLI + System tools + User tools

With Windows, OS-X, FreeBSD, and the other BSDs you don't update this
tool or that shell  or even the kernel when it becomes out of date,
you update the whole system. The OS is managed by one party.

Linux = Kernel
SuSE, RedHat, Debian, etc. = Linux + 3rd party shell + 3rd party
system tools + 3rd party user tools

Those are distributions that "bundle" the Linux Kernel with other peoples stuff.

You could call GNU/Linux an operating system but I wouldn't, not after
being introduced to an engineered system like FreeBSD. FreeBSD is to
Linux as Gold is to Lead, there very similar but one is worthless.


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