[Doug Vitale]

Greetings,

I have been busy looking for a new place of employment lately (in the IT field), and quite a few job descriptions say that knowledge of UNIX is either a plus or a requirement.

I took one UNIX course in college two years ago; basically we just telnetted into a UNIX server and interacted with it via a command line interface. Are there any edition of UNIX that have a GUI as opposed to just a boring CLI?

So where could I download a copy of the UNIX OS so I can practice with it? Would that be free or do I need to buy it from SCO now?

Can I set a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP so I can choose which OS to load at boot up?

Lastly, can anyone recommend some good books that will really help get my feet wet with using UNIX? Because apparently UNIX is still a popular serve OS, even though Windows Server has gained popularity. Thanks a lot!

[lynch]

PCBSD:
http://www.pcbsd.org/index.php?p=download

[Tapeuup]

http://forums.techguy.org/unix-linux...nt-5-10-a.html

[bpmurray]

Try installing cygwin. This is a unix lookalike that runs in Windows, and has a shell window too, and even X, although that is as slow as you might expect.

[Doug Vitale]

Thanks for those ideas. I will definitely try out PCBSD and Cygwin.

Can anyone recommend some helpful UNIX books? Perhaps something from Amazon?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/se...rank&x=15&y=11

The book I used in my course was Unix Shell Programming...talk about boring!

[BanditFlyer]

Essential System Administration is by far the best unix book I've ever come across. Comes in very handy very often. Edit: if you're doing system administration - if not,

Unix Made Easy is a slightly better beginners book and a decent reference - I'm always digging in it - it really is a good reference for the basics - I've installed various unix-like utilities on most Winblows machines I've used, WinVi32 being one of my all time faves.

I'm pretty sure you can still get SunSolaris for free or close to it. Try doing a search on the dreaded www.sun.com (I used to work for SGI - Sun Micro was our mortal enemy) for "download Solaris". I think freeBSD was already mentioned. Pretty sure they both have a nice GUI, although I actually haven't used freeBSD.

All the unises I've used have had some type of GUI. HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, and the various Linuses. Getting it working over a network sucks up bandwidth though, so it usually isn't done. You wouldn't need it on a server, since it's not a 'customer'-type machine - that's probably why you didn't see it. Your university probably has at least one lab with a bunch of Unix workstations that run GUIs(might try the Engineering Dept. - windoze doesn't usually suffice for what they do).

WRT Free Unix Distro, found this: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/...es_program.xml

- may Bill Joy smile upon you

[rob.rice]

linux is a unix like system it differs olny in the kernel and the API the file system setup is the same the boot scripts
are the same command line commands and options the syntax of the options are the same
a good source of info is http://www.tldp.org/ yes it is linux but all of it applys to UNIX

any one who wants some one who knows UNIX will be just as happy with some one who knows linux

but if you want the UNIX name there about 4~5 kinds of BSD UNIX free for the download google even has a search page for BSD at http://google.com/bsd

the was a thing at zed net that most places that tryed windows server are going back to Unix and linux

[BanditFlyer]

Linux and Unix are very hard to beat as far as performance and reliability, although MS has come a long way

[rob.rice]

Originally Posted by BanditFlyer

Linux and Unix are very hard to beat as far as performance and reliability, although MS has come a long way

I don't install windows with out installing linux as well .
Because as soon as windows bellys up there is no way to recover the data with out another O/S to read the hard drive .
From what I have seen linux runs about 4 to 5 times faster than windows XP.
I have had linux computers running for 6 months at a time with out rebooting I can't count on windows running over night even a fresh install of XP that was auto updated most of the time has crashed over night .
I have had 50 web pages open on linux the best I have seen on windows with out crashing was 9 .
Linux will allow me to kill everthing but the shell and it still works I doubt that can be done with windows.