So, you're reading my article, eh? Well, this is the first one, so some explanation may be needed. For the uninitiated, this is a UNIX column. It talks about incorporating unix in a Mac network, or on a dual boot system, or whathaveyou. "But what of the name of this column?" you ask. The Penguin is the universal Linux mascot. The daemon, or beastie, depending on who you ask, is the mascot of the BSD (beastie – see?) family of OSes.

Now with that out of the way, let's actually get to the meat of the article. Since this is the first of a series, we shall start with some very basic stuff. Namely, definitions. You may be rolling your eyes now, but read through this, and you will have a better understanding on the state of OSX. Ooh, that got your attention, didn't it? The purpose of this series is partly to debunk myths surrounding OSX, and party to convey some general UNIX knowledge.

First, some of you may be asking yourself "what is UNIX"? People give you answers like "It's a very powerful, hard to use operating system." But that doesn't tell you much. So here's the real scoop.

UNIX was developed at Bell Labs (later AT&T) using the C programming language (which was also developed at Bell for the sole purpose of writing UNIX). It was distributed to various educational institutions who then hacked it to pieces.

One particular school, the University of California at Berkeley, got their copy of UNIX and proceeded to add some features. Hundreds of features. Thousands of features. Most everybody who passed through that school added something to the operating system. It got to be very popular. Berkeley, sensing the chance at making a quick buck, released official Berkeley Systems Distributions (or Software Design or whatever permutation you like). And thus BSD was born. BSD is what we call a "UNIX-like operating system". It isn't officially UNIX, but it behaves as such. I'll get to this later.

Meanwhile, back at Bell – or rather, AT&T – monkies (known as USL) were working 'round the clock to add to their own UNIX all those goodies the brats at Berkeley had developed. As well, they threw in Sun's NFS (Network File System), and a whole bunch of industry standards related stuff (research POSIX, ABI, X/Open) The result, as we see it today, is SVR4 (System V Release 4).

Those are the two major versions of UNIX. For historical purposes, you might want to research OSF/1, yet another version of UNIX which was developed by the Open Software Foundation to compete with SVR4. Unless you work with DECs or AIX, you don't really have to care about it, though.

But what about this Linux thing? Isn't it UNIX, too? No, Linux is most definitely NOT UNIX. Again, it's a "UNIX-like" operating system. The official name for Linux is "GNU-Linux". GNU stands for "GNU's not UNIX". Ha ha. Computer geek humor. Linux is strange to use for the user of either BSD or System V. At its core it most closely resembles System V. However, seeing as most of its user applications were taken from GNU (fans of BSD) at a user level it feels a little more like BSD. Linux is a relatively recent addition to the UNIX family. The project was started by Linus Torvalds in 1992 as a replacement for the educational, and entirely crappy system known as Minix.

Where does OSX fit in to this? Well, according to Steve Job's keynote, OSX is similar to Linux. This is just Mr. Jobs capitalizing on the media hype currently surrounding Linux. OSX is BSD. There is a fully working version of 4.4BSD (the latest, and hopefully last version) running under that beautiful interface. I've found that almost anything that will run on BSD in a command line terminal will run on OSX with a simple recompile. However there is one very large limitation placed on the selection of programs OSX can run.

We'll get in to that next time.