So, where do people get UNIX (not Linux) anyhow? Can UNIX run on a PC? I realize this is probably so obvious as to be laughable for most UNIX familiar people, but I really don't know.

If you want a Unix other than Linux for the PC then you might want to check out one of the BSDs. Apple of course has OSX, which is a port of BSD for their architecture.

UNIX can in fact run on a PC. There are several versions, probably the most up to date is Solaris/x86.

Microsoft even made one at once point (Xenix?). I've used something called "Unixware" which was one owned by Novell / SCO at some point.

However, commercial Unix are normally expensive and difficult to use compared to (for example) Linux distributions or BSDs.

I believe you can use Solaris/x86 free-of-charge for noncommercial purposes on machines with < some number of CPUs (more than one, anyway). I've not tried it.

Mark

UNIX, as in the actual OS that was made quite a few years ago, is probably not still available to buy. The closest UNIX relatives right now I believe are the *BSD's, which include: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. I don't believe any of these have had any UNIX code in them for a while--around 15 years.

Quote: Original post by EzInKy
If you want a Unix other than Linux for the PC then you might want to check out one of the BSDs. Apple of course has OSX, which is a port of BSD for their architecture.

Ick, no. OS X is a remake of Mach, not BSD. Mach is evil and crappy.

Quote: Original post by bytecoder
UNIX, as in the actual OS that was made quite a few years ago, is probably not still available to buy. The closest UNIX relatives right now I believe are the *BSD's, which include: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. I don't believe any of these have had any UNIX code in them for a while--around 15 years.

They don't have any System V Unix code in them, they do have a quite a bit of BSD Unix code, however.

Ok, so if I see a company is using UNIX for their game servers (Blizzard for example with WoW), what UNIX are they using?

For UNIX you should try Sun Solaris 10. I've heared good things about it.

Quote: Original post by Ilici
For UNIX you should try Sun Solaris 10. I've heared good things about it.

Is that the "flavor" of UNIX employed by most large game server networks? Does anyone use the windows server platform?

Quote: Is that the "flavor" of UNIX employed by most large game server networks? Does anyone use the windows server platform?

I'm guessing FreeBSD and Linux would be more popular than Solaris for game server networks.

Quote: Ick, no. OS X is a remake of Mach, not BSD. Mach is evil and crappy.

XNU is based on Mach, and the Mach component handles low-level stuff (IPC, threads, virtual-memory). XNU also includes a BSD subsystem running in the kernel space, which handles processes, TCP/sockets, security, etc. A significant portion of the Darwin operating system is based on FreeBSD.

Quote: Original post by igni ferroque

Quote: Is that the "flavor" of UNIX employed by most large game server networks? Does anyone use the windows server platform?

I'm guessing FreeBSD and Linux would be more popular than Solaris for game server networks.

Why is that?