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Full Discussion: Is UNIX an open source OS ?
Operating Systems Linux Fedora Is UNIX an open source OS ? Post 302910075 by sreyan32 on Tuesday 22nd of July 2014 09:36:54 AM
Old 07-22-2014
Is UNIX an open source OS ?

Hi everyone,
I know the following questions are noobish questions but I am asking them because I am confused about the basics of history behind UNIX and LINUX.

Ok onto business, my questions are-:

  1. Was/Is UNIX ever an open source operating system ?
  2. If UNIX was closed source (as Wikipedia states as "historically closed source") then is LINUX a reverse engineered version of UNIX ?
    I mean if UNIX was closed source how did Linus Torvalds create a "UNIX-like" OS called LINUX without having access to the source code of a closed source OS. The only possible explanation seems reverse engineering UNIX just like ReactOS is a reversed engineered binary compatible version of Windows.
  3. Now this seems a little odd to ask. Is LINUX actually an OS ? Or is Linux just a kernel ? I am asking this because the Debian OS which I use can work on Linux, FreeBSD and I think the GNU Hurd kernel (I have no idea what it is by the way). Wikipedia defines Linux as an OS while I have never used an OS called Linux but I have used distros like "Fedora", "Debian", etc.

Okay that's about it for now. Please don't flame me, I am really confused between the basics here.

Thanks in advance.
 

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DPKG-PRECONFIGURE(8)						      Debconf						      DPKG-PRECONFIGURE(8)

NAME
dpkg-preconfigure - let packages ask questions prior to their installation SYNOPSIS
dpkg-preconfigure [options] package.deb dpkg-preconfigure --apt DESCRIPTION
dpkg-preconfigure lets packages ask questions before they are installed. It operates on a set of debian packages, and all packages that use debconf will have their config script run so they can examine the system and ask questions. OPTIONS
-ftype, --frontend=type Select the frontend to use. -pvalue, --priority=value Set the lowest priority of questions you are interested in. Any questions with a priority below the selected priority will be ignored and their default answers will be used. --terse Enables terse output mode. This affects only some frontends. --apt Run in apt mode. It will expect to read a set of package filenames from stdin, rather than getting them as parameters. Typically this is used to make apt run dpkg-preconfigure on all packages before they are installed. To do this, add something like this to /etc/apt/apt.conf: // Pre-configure all packages before // they are installed. DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs { "dpkg-preconfigure --apt --priority=low"; }; -h, --help Display usage help. SEE ALSO
debconf(7) AUTHOR
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> 2018-02-28 DPKG-PRECONFIGURE(8)
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