[BBLISA] Desktop policies and UNIX-ish operating systems

[Jurvis LaSalle]

On Jan 30, 2010, at 1:35 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

> All I meant, originally, by poking fun at OSX as a "unix" was this:
> 
> People go around saying OSX is Unix because it runs a Netbsd kernel.  When
> you're a unix or linux admin, new to OSX, people assume, "Well, it's a unix.
> You must already know how to use it, at least to the level that all unixes
> have in common."  But this is way false.  Your past knowledge of other
> unixes will help you just as much as your past knowledge of windows systems,
> when it comes to OSX.
> 
> In my opinion, running the netbsd kernel doesn't make OSX much more
> unix-like, than running the VMS kernel makes Windows NT vms-like.  They're
> wholly separate beasts, with almost no connection to the platform from
> whence it originally derived.
> 

XNU is not unix ;-), and it certainly isn't NetBSD.  It uses more FreeBSD code than anything, esp. since Jordan Hubbard came on board. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch_xnu.html

managing the userland of any unix is fraught with learning the local dialect.  Judging from your list of complaints, I'm going to guess that you played with OS X in the 10.2/10.3 time frame, didn't install the BSD subsystem package the first time through, tried to upgrade to perl5.8 from CPAN and hit the case-insensitivity problem and have dogged it ever since.  I urge you to take another look.  It is different and they definitely give little thought to the whims and desires unix system administrators, but the environment continues to improve.