Unix

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OK as a student for computer science, I'm thinking of focusing on either system's admin or embbeded systems. I'm wondering what would be better for my to learn along side linux (trying to learn gentoo and I have a old disto of red hat enterprise.) Ok sorry for rambing on a little but what would be best for me to learn Solaris, or BSD or both?

Thanks in advance.
 

vansmith

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OS X is certified Unix (assuming you're using Leopard on an Intel Mac...I think). If you are trying to learn *nix, you're using it right now ;D.

uname -a illustrates this fact:
Code:
Darwin A-Zombies-Mac.local 9.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

It can't hurt to learn both because each has it's own idiosyncrasies. Solaris is a little harder to get working on common hardware but the OpenSolaris project is attempting to fix that (slowly).

The BSDs are pretty good - worth a shot. Coming from a Linux user of 4.5 years, you probably won't be too lost in either of them but you will have to learn some of their nuances.
 
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yep I'm using leopard, was just wondering. Cause I know a lot of server hardware/networking stuff is sun based products and require a solaris server.

Thanks. =)
 

vansmith

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Sun runs Linux on some of it's hardware now along with Solaris according to their server list.
 
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I'm a sysadmin, and at home I have a Linux box, a Solaris x86 box, and three Macs. At work I have mostly Solaris and IBM AIX boxes. Between any of the BSDs and Solaris for you to learn, I'd recommend Solaris because it will get you more jobs. And you can download it (or OpenSolaris) and install it yourself at home for free to learn.
 
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additionally once you learn one Unix variant the others are relatively easy to pick up. Most are fairly similar.
 

vansmith

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I'm a sysadmin, and at home I have a Linux box, a Solaris x86 box, and three Macs. At work I have mostly Solaris and IBM AIX boxes. Between any of the BSDs and Solaris for you to learn, I'd recommend Solaris because it will get you more jobs. And you can download it (or OpenSolaris) and install it yourself at home for free to learn.
Can you not get "regular" Solaris for free as well?
 
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You should start learning about the innards of Mac OS X and using the command line (via Terminal.app or Xterm in X11.app like I do). You could try the various shells. I believe Leopard comes with zsh, bash, sh, and a few others. My favorite is zsh. They're quite similar. Once you've learned the command line, you're good to go for the most part. Then, you'll just need to learn the different maintenance tools and files on each type of Unix or Unix-like system you learn. Of course, that's oversimplifying a lot. My personal favorites are Mac OS X and FreeBSD on the Unix side and Debian on the Linux side. I use Mac OS X and FreeBSD on a regular basis. At this point, I wouldn't start with Solaris though. Solaris is a lot more difficult to pick up than a BSD or a Linux because of how traditional it is. I wouldn't start with Gentoo either because Gentoo will leave a sour taste in your mouth if you compare to anything that has even a remote amount of quality.
 

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