Hi,
I am kind of new to Unix. I have been working with Linux since the past 6 months or so. I have tried many linux distros. However I had never tried out a Unix distro. The only Unix I knew was FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Now comming to this forum I am impressed coz Unix is almost as varied as Linux is. Not to mention that I find Unix (FreeBSD) a bit more tougher to handle than Debian or Mandivra.

Well, thoes are just my thoughts.

P.S :- Can anyone tell me what is the difference between linux and unix OSs ??

History of UNIX and Linux here is a good url for history about unix/linux.

If you're a software developer (C specially) use gentoo (you can rapidly have access to sources from any program you're running).

If you want to see a pleasant linux environment try ubuntu (gnome) or kubuntu (kde)

hi,

Thanks for the links - very educational.

BTW I had a gentoo cd (700 something MB) but there was no gui :/

But I did not know gentoo was unix - thought it was a linux distro

Gentoo is a Linux distro. I mentioned it because you also posted something about trying Linux distros and those are the best IMHO.

To install gentoo you must read the handbook at their homepage. It's not that hard but there's no GUI (at least there wasn't the last time I installed)

It depends what you're trying to do with your Unix flavour.

distrowatch.com compares the linux distributions.

if you're wanting to learn about linux and how it works from an admin or internals point of view, then definitely gentoo is the best system to try. you'll have to read a lot, configure a lot and compile a lot, but you will learn heaps. It's also somewhat BSD-ish with it's Portage thing.

if you just want to quickly get started in unix, by having a system running fairly easily and then to play with userland tools, try something with more userland config tools, like a *buntu. If you come from Windows, best bet would be something like Mandriva or openSUSE (my fave).

If you don't want to install unix at all, there are Live CDs. Or you could add Cygwin to your windows system to have the basic tools to play with. Or on a Macintosh, open up the Terminal application and poke around...

However for SysV style stuff, you'd be better off learning in openSolaris, which is dead simple to install these days too.

Clear as mud? :-)

See also What is unix and is linux a unix system over in the FAQ section