[geeks] q: good source for leather book bag?

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 01:33:07PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:

>Darwin is not really a BSD; it's more like Mach with a Unix emulation
>layer (probably more BSD than SysV Unix, admitted).  To a naove user,
>it feels like a Unix - to approximately the same users who have trouble
>telling Red Hat from AIX from 4.3BSD.  If you start trying to use the
>full power available; if you start writing code; if you're a sysadmin -
>any of those, the deeper you scratch the surface the less it looks like
>a Unix.  For example, I recently tried to get my gf's iMac (running OSX
>Tiger) into a state where the network was working and the disk was
>still mounted read-only, something that's a total no-brainer on every
>Unix I've ever had occasion to play sysadmin to.  After struggling with
>it for a few hours, I asked an email friend who works at Apple, who
>says this is possible but how you do it varies widely from release to
>release, and he couldn't remember the recipe for Tiger.  (I eventually
>addressed the underlying desire another way.)

My darwin system gives me "a hit a key or in 5 seconds I boot on my own"
message. 

At that point you can type "-s" for single use mode, which then gives you
directions on how to mount root read/write and a shell prompt, or the ones
I use more often, -f (to flush the kernel extensions cache) or -v for a
verbose boot.

According to Apple:

	http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh343.html

(command S does it).

This was found easily by STFW'ing for "tiger single user mode", which IMHO
says that you should avoid trying to fix a computer unless you have a working
one with an Internet connection handy.

As for not being UNIX or BSD like, in command mode, it's close enough.
The problem is that most people confuse a distribution with an operating
system. Darwin is a distribution of BSD, but it is not NetBSD, or OpenBSD,
or for that matter, SunOS, Solaris (of any flavor), AIX, or the "BSD-ish"
commands often included in a Linux distro.

BTW, Red Hat is Linux, not UNIX, the programs included with it are re-writes
of UNIX programs (to fit the GPL) and AIX is System V UNIX, which is supposed
to be a seperate fork from BSD. 

Since System V release 3.2, there was appplication program (kernel call
level) compatibility and a full set of BSD commands in a seperate path.

System administration was never really part of the AT&T UNIX spec, and that's
why every distribution had their own tools, for example Solaris with its own
versus AIX with its, but they are both based on System V release 4, so under
the covers they are pretty much the same.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM