Differences between Darwin and RedHat Fedora?

Hi,

I'm wondering what are the differences between Darwin and RedHat Fedora? How different are they.

Thanks

First of all, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "RedHat Fedora." There are two different distributions, "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and "Fedora Core." Fedora Core is a free distribution, while RHEL is the commercial version. Both are based on Fedora Core.

In some ways, the difference between FC & RHEL is like the difference between Darwin and Mac OS X: One is a free, open project, and the other is a packaged product.

From a technical standpoint, Darwin is the name for OS X's kernel. The version of Darwin that you can download from Apple is a very limited operating system. There's no window system, and only a few basic command-line tools. You could potentially make Darwin look very much like Fedora, or any other Linux distribution, by adding open-source packages like xFree86, GNOME, and apps like Mozilla, but this would take some work.

From an even more technical standpoint, Darwin is based on FreeBSD and not Linux. There are some minor technical and philosophical differences between BSD and Linux, which I frankly don't care that much about.

I don't know of anyone (other than maybe some engineers at Apple) who uses Darwin (and not OS X) as their main OS.

technologist said:

Darwin is based on FreeBSD and not Linux.

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I've asked this same questions a million times, and no one has ever gave me a solid answer. Maybe you can answer this question: What's the different between FreeBSD and Linux.

Both of them are derived from the AT&T Unix, but with these many versions, are they really different? If I write a software that runs on Fedora, will it run on FreeBSD? It's confusing...

They both are UNIX-derived systems, though FreeBSD is still considered as being a UNIX system, while Linux is not, because it is more like a "light" version of UNIX.
Actually, the difference between UNIX and Linux is more on the philosophical side, rather than technical.

But I'm sure that, through research on the Internet, you will find a more detailed answer to this.

are there other kinds of UNIX OSes out there other than Mac and Linux?

nicklwj said:

are there other kinds of UNIX OSes out there other than Mac and Linux?

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Just to name a few:
HP-UX from HP
AIX from IBM
BSD from Berkeley, on which are based FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, NExTstep (the predecessor of Mac OS X) and Solaris from Sun
IRIX from SGI

Those UNIXes are still in use, though a lot older than any Microsoft or Apple OS.

BSD vs. Linux

But don't take that too seriously. Some people get into flamewars about this, but a good many won't notice the difference.