Im new so this may sound really stooo-pid.

[Sephirros]

I run WinXP Pro and often hook into a remote Unix server at my college with SSH Telnet... I want to know if its possible to have a copy of Unix on my home system I can run in some kind of window over XP so I can piddle with it and learn about it more without having to totally boot into it. Im not quite ready to totally leave familiar ground just yet. So Im wondering... is Unix open source? If it is, why hasnt Microsoft put out a standard version of it, why DOS?

Thanks guys for any replies that may help.

BTW... I figure since Anandtech is a damn nice and decent site that the forums arent full of trolls and flamers also... am I correct? (Guess I will know if I get flamed huh?)

 

[Spyro]

I run WinXP Pro and often hook into a remote Unix server at my college with SSH Telnet... I want to know if its possible to have a copy of Unix on my home system I can run in some kind of window over XP so I can piddle with it and learn about it more without having to totally boot into it. Im not quite ready to totally leave familiar ground just yet.

First of all there is no such thing as a stooo-pid question. If someone asks a question, then it should be answered. For running linux from a windows window you could try VMWare. I know that it works for running windows in a linux terminal, and I think that it can do the same for running linux in a windows box.

So Im wondering... is Unix open source? If it is, why hasnt Microsoft put out a standard version of it, why DOS?

Microsoft doesn't make any type of *nix. Linux, Unix, etc. are all competitors with microsoft windows.

Thanks guys for any replies that may help.

Your welcome .

BTW... I figure since Anandtech is a damn nice and decent site that the forums arent full of trolls and flamers also... am I correct?

That question depends on whether or not you post in off topic or not.

(Guess I will know if I get flamed huh?)

Hmmmm, maybe.......

 

[Nothinman]

I run WinXP Pro and often hook into a remote Unix server at my college with SSH Telnet...

ssh and telnet are two different things.

I want to know if its possible to have a copy of Unix on my home system

Depends. The only unix that runs on x86 hardware is Solaris, and I wouldn't recommend it because the x86 port of it sucks. There are other unix-like systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux, etc that run great on x86 systems and are free. You'll have to find out what your college uses before you can know if you can run the same thing on your PC.

So Im wondering... is Unix open source?

No. Most unixes are very closed, sometimes more-so than Windows. As for unix-like OSes like the ones I mentioned above, most of them are Open Source.

If it is, why hasnt Microsoft put out a standard version of it, why DOS?

They've got years of QA, IP, development, etc dumped into a solution that 95% of the computing community runs and they control that software 100% with an iron fist, why would they change that? If they ever get desperate they may do what Apple did and release something BSD based so they can keep the source to themselves, but they'll never release a Linux distro because of the license.

 

[neit]

you may want to try a thing called http://www.cygwin.com/ which is lets you run unix like stuff on ms windows. Its works off of a dll, but i think you should go ahead and try it, mess with it, and have it screw over your computer, afterall, there is no better way to learn something than to fix a problem you've caused (/me recalls learnong slackware as first non-win OS...)

though you *can* mess stuff up, its pretty simple to the point where you probably won't, and if you have problems there are many people that use it on the forum.

 

[drag]

Oh, I don't know.. If you have a shell acount in a unix box and can get in it, just play around in there... you know learn about shell scripting and learn the command line commands. Man files are your freinds... Putty.exe is a great win32 ssh/telnet/rsh program...

You may try that cywgin thing...


If you don't what to reinstall everything and go with a full fledged linux distro there are a couple alternatives:

IF you want a real raw authentic-feeling Unix experiance you can just try using Zipslack.. It's avaiable from slackware.com and will install in any Fat32 partition... just read and follow the directions carefully and you can boot into it... It only takes about 100megs of space and you won't have to worry about repartitioning your harddrive.... The downside is no nice graphical interface or any niceties. It's a brute minimal linux version.. If ya figure out what your doing you can install X windows on it at the price of about 256 megs of extra diskspace... To bad it won't work if you got a NTFS formatted harddrive.

If you have a nice internet connection and have access to a cd burner, you can use a live cd. These are linux-on-a-cd, and will run completely off of the CDrom drive.. these come with all the nice gui stuff, too.

THe one I like is SuSE's live eval 8.1 cd... This is a made to show off their up and coming 8.1 realese, but it's still kinda beta software, so there are a couple bugs.. Real nice kde interface. all the bells and whistles.. has about a 75%-85% chance of configuring itself and setting itself up with no user intervention. This can be a real "cushy" OS. But it's Linux! which in reality is no more different to Unix then SystemV-based Unix is to BSD-based Unix...

Another eval cd that is highly recommended is Knoppix. It's a debian-based Linux distro. A little bit more daunting to a newb, but it is still realy nice and very usefull, very much more so than the SuSE eval..

You can get both from www.linuxiso.org

 

[lowtech1]

I have to second what Drag said regarding the CD distros.

There are a few distros that you can install in Windows, but they are weak incompare to distor such as Knoppix , Suse Live-Eval , or Morphix (new beta comer that base of Knoppix with Gnome desktop).

 

[steell]

MicroSoft did release a version of Unix, IIRC it was called Xenix. They just did not make any money on it so they dropped it/sold it off, don't remember which

 

[doan]

I Use Virtual-PC to run multiple OS's on my windows machine

 

[lowtech1]

Originally posted by: steell
MicroSoft did release a version of Unix, IIRC it was called Xenix. They just did not make any money on it so they dropped it/sold it off, don't remember which

I think they sold it to SCO, now part of Caldera.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: doan
I Use Virtual-PC to run multiple OS's on my windows machine

virtual PC has a 45-day free trial.
vmware has a 30-day free trial.

 

[TonyRic]

The problem with Virtual PC now is that it is owned by MS. Go with VMWare if you are buying one.