Thread: Anyone else dislikes tablets - all tablets?
View Single Post
Old 07-10-2014, 11:53 PM   #107
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK View Post
Would you really consider Android a "flavor" of Linux? I would call it system running on top of Linux. Similarly I would not have called Windows 3.1 or GEOS "flavors" of DOS.
If you prefer, call Android a Linux system rather than a flavor of Linux. Android is one of many systems that uses a Linux kernel.

I wouldn't call Win 3.1 a flavor of DOS either. It booted from DOS, and used the DOS FAT file system, but didn't exactly use a DOS kernel. The GUI and protected mode memory management support were supplied by Windows. Win 9X further increased the separation. It used DOS as a real-mode loader, but once up, Win 9X was a full protected mode OS, and DOS was out of the loop. Win 9X ran on a DOS FAT file system, but did not use DOS for file system access.

GEOS didn't originate on DOS. I ran it back when on a Commodore 64, and there was also an Apple II version. On PCs, GEOS was a user space application that booted from DOS. I never played with it on a PC, so I don't know what DOS did for it other than serve as a loader.

Most of what people think of when they think of a Linux system are all things running on top of Linux, but are not required for it to be a Linux system. X-windows and the window manager you use to provide a GUI are layered on top of the OS. You can boot a Linux system to a command line and not run a GUI, and still have a multitasking, multi-user OS.

Along the same lines, Mac OS/X is a Unix system, using a modified BSD kernel, with a complement of the standard Gnu utilities, and an Apple GUI.

Current NT based versions of Windows are full native protected mode OSes, but with a different separation of functions than Linux. You can't boot Windows to a command line. (Well, technically, you can, if you hack the registry, but you'll have fun trying to use it.)

A lot of these things were architecture dependent. Real mode vs protected mode, for example, were intrinsic to the segmented architecture of the X86 processors. I don't believe they are meaningful on things like ARM devices.
______
Dennis
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote