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On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:24:29 +0000 Richard Brown wrote:
Hi I think I might have had a ..... well it hurt my brain anyway. This has seemed a bit of a fruitless thread until these points were made. If I understand it correctly. Neil seems to be saying that GNU is the system upon which OS's are and can be built. If I have understood this correctly BSD upon which resides Mac OS X relies on GNU and therefore OS X is GNU based. I suppose Windows could rebuild there whole system basing it on GNU?!? Could anybody clarify this for me? It seems that what we are talking about is a radical shift in how computers are run, should the revolution truly happen. Basically it seems that if all OSs use GNU, there would be no lockdowns in terms of use of software. I could buy in OS X and recompile to run on Linux. Or is that a simplification? Thanks Rich
Yep, it'll make your brain hurt at some point! Basically *all* current systems have to be compiled from source code into a kernel that's executable on the architecture. I do not believe that any of the current big OSs are written in anything other than high-level languages such as C. As such, all OSs require a compiler/linker at some stage. GNU provides such a compiler/linker. Therefore any system whose source code is available and known to work on your platform, could be recompiled under another system. HURD can be compiled using the GNU tools running on Linux. This is the basic principle behind systems like "Linux From Scratch". Grant. -- Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.