[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[der Mouse]

> I don't understand this argument against MacOS X being UNIX.  It is,
> it's been certified as such by those that do that sort of thing.

Right.  And that's about all there is to say about it being UNIX, that
is, the trademark.

As for it being Unix, that is, the generic core that the various OSes
derived from V7 have more or less in common?  UNIX bears comparatively
little relation to that, being, as far as I can tell, mostly about
POSIX interfaces, which I understand even Windows has these days.
(Note that that understanding may well be wrong; I've never looked at
exactly what hoops must be jumped through to get the UNIX stamp.)

It is and it isn't.  The surface layer is a pretty good Unix, as such
things go at that layer, and that's mostly what you outline in the
remaining three or four paragraphs of your mail.  But, as you scratch
below that layer, it begins to look less like Unix, and the deeper you
scratch, the more non-Unixy things look.  For example, if you boot
single-user, network interfaces don't even _exist_ as far as the Unix
emulation layer (eg, ifconfig) is concerned - you have to know it
really is a message-passing microkernel under the hood to grok why it's
necessary to start some idiosyncratic daemon in order to make the
machine's network interface appear.  I once spent most of an afternoon
trying to get a Tiger system into a state where networking worked and
the root filesystem was still read-only.  I'm told this is possible but
how it's done varies wildly from release to release of OS X - this is a
good example where scratching below the surface in a sysadmin direction
turns up something very non-Unix.

> What part of your understanding of 'UNIX' is missing from OS X?

None, since you are, again, using the trademarked term, and my
understanding of that is "it's got the stamp of approval from the
trademark holder".

If you'd asked about Unix, instead, my answer would be, approximately,
"the parts below the surface": the deeper below the surface I've
looked, the less Unixy things have looked.

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