[ubuntu-uk] old Toshiba/OpenBSD

[Daniel Llewellyn]

On 9 September 2014 06:52, Steven Roberts <cwmbranmathstutor at gmail.com>
wrote:

> OpenBSD could have been an option too, possibly. I set that up on an
> ancient laptop a couple of years ago. Good fun and it taught me a lot about
> Linux!


*Nit-Pick alert! (please don't be offended - it's not meant to deride)*

That's interesting because, as we should all be aware, OpenBSD (and FreeBSD
and others) is NOT Linux. At all.

It uses both an entirely different kernel and prescribed userland* which
means the only similarity (besides similarly named utilities which aren't
based on the same code as each other causing subtle differences in function
such as bsd sed vs gnu sed's accepted command-line arguments) is that BSDs
and Linux distros are POSIX compliant which allows software to be
recompiled to work on either.

The point here is the re-compile step - you can't take linux software in
binary-form and expect it to work on a BSD (ignoring FreeBSD's linuxulator
for now because that muddies the water a bit). Instead you need to compile
it from source code specifically for the BSD you're running.

* The Debian project has a release which takes the Debian GNU-based
userland and the FreeBSD kernel and marries the two to make a
GNU/Debian/kFreeBSD hybrid which is decidedly NOT FreeBSD because it uses
GNU instead of the FreeBSD userland and decided NOT Linux because there is
no trace of the Linux kernel (the requirement for something to call itself
Linux). The only similarity between Debian/kFreeBSD and a GNU/Linux is the
GNU part.

-- 
Daniel Llewellyn
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