Just trying to find out a few things .... Post: 302211473

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Just trying to find out a few things .... Post 302211473 by jim mcnamara on Thursday 3rd of July 2008 12:08:38 PM

07-03-2008

Registered User

The original UNIX from Bell Labs was provided free on a tape. Later on the OS diverged into different directions, like BSD or System V. During the late 80's and early 90's the OS releases became very proprietary - Sun had one, Hewlett Packard another, and so on. This proliferation of UNIX systems also is known as flavors.

Things are opening up in part because of the open source movement. So, everyone realized that having different commands (or C functions) for the same thing or commands with the same name with different behaviors was a bad thing. So we have an alphabet soup of proposed standards.

Currently, POSIX standards are the one most OS developers try to follow. This means that development is easier when you have to write the same code for Solaris, HPUX, and Linux.

The reason we have to know what OS we are talking about is that some have "bizarre"
features. If we give an answer without knowing which flavor, we may give a bad answer. The Solaris version of awk is an example of a kind of bizarre version of a UNIX tool, for example.

Maybe try downloading knoppix, it is smaller than some others. Damn Small Linux is smallest UNIX meant for desktops ~50MB.
DSL information

The download time is a function of your connection speed. If you are at dialup speeds something like knoppix will take overnight. 1.5Mb DSL connection maybe several hours.

jim mcnamara

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

diffindex-download

DIFFINDEX-DOWNLOAD(1)													     DIFFINDEX-DOWNLOAD(1)

NAME

       diffindex-download - Download utility for Debian Contents files

SYNOPSIS

       diffindex-download [ options ] URL filename

DESCRIPTION

       diffindex-download  is  a command line tool for downloading Contents files. It uses APT's diff/Index format patches when available to avoid
       downloading the full file.  diffindex-download is used by apt-file.

OPTIONS

	  -n number
	      If more than number patches would be necessary, download the whole file. Specifying 0 to always download the whole file is possible.

	  -k  Don't verify the peer certificate when using https.

	  -c cacert
	      If cacert is a directory: Use cacert as CA certificate path. Otherwise use cacert as CA certificate bundle.  See	the  --capath  and
	      --cacert options in the curl(1) man page.

	  -i  Don't exit with errror if the URL does not exist. This is useful as some archives don't provide Contents files.

	  -q  Be quiet (opposite of -v). The default if stdout is not a terminal.

	  -v  Be verbose (opposite of -q). The default if stdout is a terminal.

	  -d  Print additional debug info.

	  -h  Display a short help screen.

SEE ALSO

       apt-file(1), diffindex-rred(1), curl(1)

AUTHOR

       diffindex-download was written by Stefan Fritsch <sf@debian.org>.

								   January 2009 					     DIFFINDEX-DOWNLOAD(1)