[mike4life]

hi,
are there any unix users out there?
i have an assignment to do and was wondering if you could give me any useull info ton the UI/GUI and how usefull it is/was
i also have to write about hte kinds of systems that unix is run on, so far i have mainly found out that it is used by big networks,
and hardly ever found on the standard desktop PC




mike =)

[Mike0001]

It is used a lot as Linux! The main guis are KDE and Gnome.

[Carbon]

Mostly used on commercial servers. There really is no GUI unless you use the kernel as a back-end or something, and that would be useless on a server where terminals are the norm.

One thing it did do was popularize C which became the de facto programming language for pretty much everything. Other OSs before Unix were written in assembly, as well as an early version of UNIX, but it was later written in C, something nobody really thought could be done efficiently.

It also prompted a pretty huge war over licensing, with Bell Labs/AT&T owning it for a while, before selling it to Novell, before selling it to SCO, which got quickly reviled when they tried to claim Linux had a bunch of pieces of (non-open) source which they suspiciously failed to actually locate for the court. Then SCO sued everyone and it went out of control.

I guess that's what happens when you own the OS that keeps the Web chugging along. Of course, Linux has taken a lot of that, but they're really two flavors of the same ice cream.

[Mike0001]

Originally Posted by Carbon

Mostly used on commercial servers. There really is no GUI unless you use the kernel as a back-end or something, and that would be useless on a server where terminals are the norm.

What do you think X Windows is for then? I can login to a server in a KDE/Gnome/any other Windows Manager and get something as good as sitting right there at the server.