Thanasis Kinias wrote: > I've built and used fairly-complete GNU userspace toolsets on Solaris, > IRIX, and (with much wailing and gnashing of teeth) AIX. The purpose is > to have consistently-functioning tools (from bash and ls on up) on all > the boxes I used. On Solaris and IRIX, even GTK and GVIM built > pretty-much automagically. That's part of the beauty of GNU -- you can > take as much or as little as you want. Yes, but the GNU tools aren't part of the standard distribution for any of those commercial Unixes, so the situation is quite different from Linux. I don't know of any Linux distribution that doesn't use GNU tools, except perhaps the ultra-minimalist ones like LNX-BBC or ttylinux, where the goal is to have a complete Linux system on a business card CD or a few floppies. Also, let me again point out that the single most important GNU component used in Linux is glibc, which you probably didn't use on Solaris or IRIX. If I were to propose my own criteria for whether or not an OS distribution should be called "GNU/(whatever)"... it's a little bit of a sliding scale in a way. I personally would be comfortable saying "GNU/(whatever)" if glibc were the standard C library for that distro, even if no other GNU software was used, but I can understand if some people felt that wasn't enough. The argument certainly gets stronger if more GNU tools are standard components. In the case of nearly all Linux distros, GNU glibc, fileutils, findutils, binutils, gcc, and bash are all standard or required. Aside from the Hurd and perhaps some of the newer free OSs like AtheOS (about which I know very little), I can't think of any other OS that depends on the GNU project so heavily. Craig
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