Just to throw a little fuel on the fire: Look in the Sun training catalog, at how they define the products themselves.
"Solaris 8 Operating Environment". Look at their web page: http://www.sun.com/solaris/ They call it the same thing. Then do a uname -a on a Solaris 8 system: SunOS chtsjs01 5.8 Generic_108528-05 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2 SunOS 5.8 is a component of the Solaris operating environment. Guess what OS stands for? SunOS 5.8 is the KERNEL, not the operating environment. If they were so inclined and appropriately licensed, Debian could do a distribution with the SunOS kernel, just like they do with the Hurd. Hurd is an OS kernel; Debian is a distribution. SunOS is an OS kernel; Solaris is an Operating Environment, I.E. a distribution. Linux is an OS kernel; Debian is a distribution, I.E. an operating environment. The parallels aren't a concidence, that's how you build a working system out of an OS. Things like "ps" and "bash" aren't part of the OS, even if you personally can't get any use out of the system without them. It is possible to build a system with nothing but a Linux OS and no filesystems, that accomplishes useful work. The other bits make it more useful, but are not required. This isn't my opinion, this is basic computer science. What are they teaching you kids in those schools these days?
msg26378/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
