UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Howdy all,

I've used various applications in the past that ran in unix and windoze and unfortunately several of those programs are migrating to a windoze only environment so management is bagging the proprietary unix boxes in the process. AArrgggghh So here's my question for all you serious unix types...

What is the difference between FreeBSD (for example) and more proprietary versions of unix like HP-UX or Solaris? Aren't they all built on rev 5 and generally adhere to the CDE? I'm sure there must be a few files or directories that are specific to a particular companies' version of unix so is there a way to find out what is different? Obviously what I'm going for is trying to run some of those unix apps on a FreeBSD box or something similar to that.

Thanks for any thoughts,

Bob

im not sure about everything, but for starters i know that different variants put config files in different places, but if you know unix, no matter if you learned with red hat linux or slackware, or netbsd or freebsd that you will feel comfortable in any unix, for the most part.

Yep that's true enough. I'm comfortable in most any *ix but I'm trying to figure out if/how to shoehorn say a Solaris/HPUX app on FreeBSD.

I may be barking up the wrong tree.....

Thnx.

FreeBSD, like it's brethren Open and Net, are based upon BSD code from Berkely and not SysV systems. Chances are that the proprietary Unixes have better SMP support than FreeBSD (it will support SMP, but not as well as Linux). FreeBSD comes with several different types of binary emulation for Solaris (not sure which versions) and Linux (based upon RedHat 7.1, IIRC). I wasn't able to find much about the Solaris support from a few Googles that I did and that is not a good sign.

Are these apps compiled from code or already in binary format? I suspect that they are already in binary format hence the problem of running on a different flavor of Unix and different hardware architecture.

That's a pretty tough situation ya got there...