Hello Everyone,

I'm new to this forum and Unix. I have a couple of questions and please, excuse my ignorance.

I have a spare machine which is now running MS Windows 98 and I would like to format the disk and install the Unix operating system along with Oracle 8i and SQL Server.

My question is this, where can I purchase the Unix software? and which version do I need? I know there is Sun Solaris, HP and AIX.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

IronBear

From the FAQ section on this site -- this question has been asked numerous times. You dont need to buy anything if you go the linux route. All the support you'll ever need is this site The guys here seem to really know their stuff. Here is a --->link

Redhat http://www.redhat.com
Suse http://www.suse.com
Mandrake http://www.mandrake.com
Debian http://www.debian.org
Slackware http://www.slackware.org
etc.

Or try one of the BSD's:
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org

Other UNIX Related sites of interest and help.
http://www.ugu.com
http://www.unixreview.com
http://www.rootprompt.org
http://www.usenix.org
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/usail/

Friends don't let friends buy software.

Please, for the good of the community, DON'T buy your flavour, download it! the links that google mentioned above are an excellent place to start. RedHat is great for newbies, but you will soon want to spread your wings and fly alone with either an LSF (Linux From Scratch) box or with debian or slackware.

...you might look into openwall linux in the future as well... it holds promise.
http://www.openwall.com/owl

Wrong Karma,

Friends pay software developers and distributors reasonable amounts of money so they can continue to live and eat.

It costs money to develop software, package it, create documents, make it available on the net (servers and bandwidth cost money).

Please, support your Linux and UNIX community by contributing to reasonable distribution fees. These people work hard and need to keep their small businesses alive and well.

neo is absolutely correct, while all linux distributions make their software available for FREE, when you can you should help contribute to the further development of the software you use. as for my self, i have become an avid fan of SuSE linux, they have come a long way from when i started using linux at their version 6.4, now at 8.2 their distro is 10x better. i would strongly reccomend SuSE linux if you are interested in linux. there are also many other options which have been listed on this thread. good luck, you will hopefully find a unix varient that is right for you.

i would recommend going out and puchasing the FreeBSD Handbook kit which includes FreeBSD 4.8. personally, i found this to be, by far, the easiest to understand documentation and one of the easiest UNIX-like OS'es you'll have the pleasure of using.

Yes, please forgive me for being so direct, but, in my opinion, paying $25 to $40 dollars for a 4-6 CD distribution of a powerful operating system with tons of applications is an incredible bargain.

Ergo, a nice meal at a moderate place to eat costs more than that! You can eat and a few hours later, you need to eat again and forget about the past meal!

Linux-based, BSD-based and other software distributions are an incredible bargain in todays world.

And, if you are from a country where $35 is an entire weeks or months salary, don't hesitate to download without a contribution!

The point is that everyone can have access to incredible software and those who can afford to contribute, should contribute.

Friends help friends...... help has many faces and names.