[Techtalk] Re: Considering an OS change

[Carla Schroder]

On Thursday 17 April 2003 3:44 pm, pheret at pheret.com wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Jennifer Davis wrote:
> > As much as I like ^H^H^H^H love Slackware, I find that I have less time
> > to manage it and was thinking of running an easier OS for my router pc
>
> hi all.  i hate to be annoying (too late) but the OS is not slackware or
> redhat or debian.  that is the distribution.  the OS is the linux kernel
> with basically gnu software driving it.  really the only thing a
> distribution does is decide how to install linux on your system and which
> archiving system to use (i.e., redhat uses rpm, debian dpkg or apt-get,
> slackware always stayed with tar.gz which is my preference, etc.).
>
> i get somewhat irritated that redhat is trying to make one think that it
> is the operating system, that you have to use theirs and theirs only to
> use certain software.  this is incorrect.
>

As long as we are getting philosophical, I think 'operating system' is 
synonymous with distribution. Because it is a system. A bare kernel doesn't 
do much, we need all the applications and utilities packaged with it to be 
able to do anything.

The various distributions often patch the kernel, and make various custom 
modifications, so I think 'operating system' is a perfectly good term for 
them.

-- 
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Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
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