that old GNU/Linux argument

Ric Moore wayward4now at gmail.com
Sat Jul 19 03:33:50 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 03:18 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Jul 15, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Gordon Messmer wrote:
> >> What we *are* advocating is that the GNU/Linux operating system be
> >> referred to as GNU/Linux because GNU is the name of the project
> >> whose goal is to provide a complete Free Software operating system.
> 
> > But that's a small minority of the code in the distribution.
> 
> Apparently you're taking 3 different concepts as synonymous: kernel,
> operating system and distribution.
> 
> A distribution is an operating system plus a bunch of applications
> that run on it.  Some examples of distributions are Fedora, Ubuntu,
> the Debian GNU/Linux main repository, BLAG, gNewSense, UTUTO-XS,
> FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
> 
> An operating system is a kernel plus a bunch of userland libraries and
> programs that users and other applications generally rely on.  Some
> examples of operating systems are GNU, BSD, UNIX, MS-Windows, VMS,
> DOS, OS/2, etc.
> 
> A kernel is the part of an operating system responsible for allocating
> machine resources.  Some examples of kernels are Linux, Hurd,
> KERNEL32.DLL, and the AFAIK nameless kernels of other operating
> systems and variants there of mentioned above.

Has HURD actually become a working kernel?? Ric

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