9 ms·

Rosetta Stone for Unix

99 points by kissgyorgy 12y ago

jessaustin 12y ago
Some parts may be a bit out of date. I mean, I do still have a box with ReiserFS on it, so I guess it's OK that's included, but ext4 is left out...
- jamiesonbecker 12y ago
  Definitely - Reiserfs for the win. Great FS for tons of small files like email, news.. ok, when you really think of it, only multimedia and database files tend to be 'large'. Everything else tends to be rather small. Btrfs is far too unreliable. I've been using Reiserfs on hundreds of servers for 16 years and the last time I can remember having any trouble with it was in 2001... great FS. Too bad distros are killing it off, but when the author's in prison, it's a bit understandable.
acomjean 12y ago
as someone who worked in an hpux and solaris (and a little AIX) shop, writing code with a fair number of system calls on these systems, brings back memories and not good ones. Subtle differences in the way everything was done. slight difference like: the max size of a udp packet was slightly smaller on hpux (or was it solaris) such that things would break in unexpected ways. The gzip or tar params where all slightly off... You got used to it but it was a pain. This reminds me why linux was ascendant. I'm not sure its better but much more consistent.
- teddyh 12y ago
  The gzip parameters should be identical, since all implementations are the GNU one. The compress program, on the other hand… EDIT: My information was obsolete – apparently some BSD’s reimplemented gzip. I stand corrected.
  - chias 12y ago
    unless different OSes provide different versions.
  - pdw 12y ago
    The BSDs have their own gzip. I know this because it rejected some files that were fine according to the official version...
- _yosefk 12y ago
  More consistent perhaps - though tremendously inconsistent between distributions, and versions of a given distribution, in an absolute sense... I read somewhere that Bill Gates said in the 80s that Unix has a versions/forks problem which will remain with it forever. If that is true then it's one bloody successful prediction.
  - tjl 12y ago
    Given that things are inconsistent across distributions, that's basically the same as being inconsistent between Solaris and AIX. One inconsistency I've been very annoyed by over the years is the differences in ps. I ended up making a .cshrc that contained aliases to work around them. I'd check which OS I was using and alias a command to call ps with the arguments I used regularly. I used to work often on Irix, Solaris, and Linux and it was a pain to remember which arguments I needed. This was especially true on ssh connections where I didn't always remember which OS a particular machine ran.
nonissue420 12y ago
Rosetta Stone is a copyrighted software app to teach you foreign languages. You must be thinking of a cheat sheet. Nothing in the link helps you 'compare languages'.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Actually, the Rosetta stone is a historical artifact which had the same text written in several languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone So this link does qualify as a sort of Rosetta Stone.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- abrowne 12y ago
  The Rosetta Stone is a stone, found near Rosetta, Egypt, with an inscription in three scripts (Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek), which led to the modern decipherment of the hieroglyphs.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Congratulations, language software company, you have better SEO than a 2200-year-old stone carving.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  Your comment depressed me. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
pjmlp 12y ago
Just goes to show that UNIX eco-system is not as portable as many youngsters think of it.
- pconner 12y ago
  As far as I know, UNIX isn't really a standard. POSIX is, with varying degrees of compliance from these OSes.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    While correct, POSIX is supposed to mirror UNIX, but only does so partially and like ANSI C, leaves room for implementation specific behaviours and extensions. So in the end, the situation isn't much better, if the goal is to reach as much UNIX like systems as possible.
  - dap 12y ago
    It absolutely is, and has been for a long time. I find it very hard to keep track of the various standards, but things got a lot simpler with v3 of the Single Unix Specification, which is the same as POSIX 2001[0]. The problem is that SUS and POSIX only define a subset of what's wanted by most modern software and a subset of the tools people need to interacting with the system. It's a double-edged sword, though: if we always stuck to what was common to all Unix-like systems, we wouldn't have lots of important OS features. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#2001:_POSIX:2001.2C_Single_UNIX_Specification_version_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#2001:...
    - cogburnd02 12y ago
      > [I]f we always stuck to what was common to all Unix-like systems, we wouldn't have lots of important OS features. Like seriously....It ain't even funny. :-| http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Limitations-of-Usual-Tools.html#Limitations-of-Usual-Tools http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/au...
gayprogrammer 12y ago
"unique id useful for licensing" => Linux "/sbin/ifconfig eth0" Really?
- jamessb 12y ago
  This sort of thing can lead to ridiculous problems. MATLAB R2013b on Mac OS tried to do something similar. However, it sometimes decided that my hostid was the MAC address of my Ethernet interface, and sometimes my wireless interface (in which case it would reject the license). In the end I resorted to obtaining two license files and manually switching them when necessary.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  TI licenses some of their products based on your MAC address. In the past I've had problems getting their products to accept licenses unless I had an eth0 interface on my Linux system. As in, I had to rename my eth1 interface to eth0 to get it to work at all.
zantana 12y ago
I'd like to see an updated subset with rhel/ubuntu/debian and systemd.
- ddingus 12y ago
  Seconded.
fit2rule 12y ago
We need one of these for The Web. That'd be a truly revolutionary contribution to the mass-communications zeitgeist: how to communicate to your social sphere, effectively, using email. How to do it with RSS, how to do it with The Web. How to stop doing it with Facebook, et al.
ddingus 12y ago
Just a comment: This page is awesome and I have used the crap out of it in the past. Once, I printed a lot of it on a large format printer so I would have it handy while administering a mixed Unix shop. HP/UX, IRIX, Solaris, Linux...
brendangregg 12y ago
This has been enormously useful, and inspired me to create one for performance metrics (from the USE method): http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-rosetta.html http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-rosetta.html
minikites 12y ago
This is very out of date, OS X hasn't used Netinfo Manager since 10.4.

99 points by kissgyorgy 12y ago

Some parts may be a bit out of date. I mean, I do still have a box with ReiserFS on it, so I guess it's OK that's included, but ext4 is left out...

jamiesonbecker 12y ago
Definitely - Reiserfs for the win. Great FS for tons of small files like email, news.. ok, when you really think of it, only multimedia and database files tend to be 'large'. Everything else tends to be rather small. Btrfs is far too unreliable. I've been using Reiserfs on hundreds of servers for 16 years and the last time I can remember having any trouble with it was in 2001... great FS. Too bad distros are killing it off, but when the author's in prison, it's a bit understandable.

acomjean 12y ago

as someone who worked in an hpux and solaris (and a little AIX) shop, writing code with a fair number of system calls on these systems, brings back memories and not good ones. Subtle differences in the way everything was done. slight difference like: the max size of a udp packet was slightly smaller on hpux (or was it solaris) such that things would break in unexpected ways. The gzip or tar params where all slightly off... You got used to it but it was a pain. This reminds me why linux was ascendant. I'm not sure its better but much more consistent.

teddyh 12y ago
The gzip parameters should be identical, since all implementations are the GNU one. The compress program, on the other hand… EDIT: My information was obsolete – apparently some BSD’s reimplemented gzip. I stand corrected.
- chias 12y ago
  unless different OSes provide different versions.
- pdw 12y ago
  The BSDs have their own gzip. I know this because it rejected some files that were fine according to the official version...
_yosefk 12y ago
More consistent perhaps - though tremendously inconsistent between distributions, and versions of a given distribution, in an absolute sense... I read somewhere that Bill Gates said in the 80s that Unix has a versions/forks problem which will remain with it forever. If that is true then it's one bloody successful prediction.
- tjl 12y ago
  Given that things are inconsistent across distributions, that's basically the same as being inconsistent between Solaris and AIX. One inconsistency I've been very annoyed by over the years is the differences in ps. I ended up making a .cshrc that contained aliases to work around them. I'd check which OS I was using and alias a command to call ps with the arguments I used regularly. I used to work often on Irix, Solaris, and Linux and it was a pain to remember which arguments I needed. This was especially true on ssh connections where I didn't always remember which OS a particular machine ran.

nonissue420 12y ago

Rosetta Stone is a copyrighted software app to teach you foreign languages. You must be thinking of a cheat sheet. Nothing in the link helps you 'compare languages'.

falcolas 12y ago
Actually, the Rosetta stone is a historical artifact which had the same text written in several languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone So this link does qualify as a sort of Rosetta Stone.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
abrowne 12y ago
The Rosetta Stone is a stone, found near Rosetta, Egypt, with an inscription in three scripts (Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek), which led to the modern decipherment of the hieroglyphs.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 12y ago
Congratulations, language software company, you have better SEO than a 2200-year-old stone carving.
copsarebastards 12y ago
Your comment depressed me. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

pjmlp 12y ago

Just goes to show that UNIX eco-system is not as portable as many youngsters think of it.

pconner 12y ago
As far as I know, UNIX isn't really a standard. POSIX is, with varying degrees of compliance from these OSes.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  While correct, POSIX is supposed to mirror UNIX, but only does so partially and like ANSI C, leaves room for implementation specific behaviours and extensions. So in the end, the situation isn't much better, if the goal is to reach as much UNIX like systems as possible.
- dap 12y ago
  It absolutely is, and has been for a long time. I find it very hard to keep track of the various standards, but things got a lot simpler with v3 of the Single Unix Specification, which is the same as POSIX 2001[0]. The problem is that SUS and POSIX only define a subset of what's wanted by most modern software and a subset of the tools people need to interacting with the system. It's a double-edged sword, though: if we always stuck to what was common to all Unix-like systems, we wouldn't have lots of important OS features. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#2001:_POSIX:2001.2C_Single_UNIX_Specification_version_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#2001:...
  - cogburnd02 12y ago
    > [I]f we always stuck to what was common to all Unix-like systems, we wouldn't have lots of important OS features. Like seriously....It ain't even funny. :-| http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Limitations-of-Usual-Tools.html#Limitations-of-Usual-Tools http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/au...

gayprogrammer 12y ago

"unique id useful for licensing" => Linux "/sbin/ifconfig eth0" Really?

jamessb 12y ago
This sort of thing can lead to ridiculous problems. MATLAB R2013b on Mac OS tried to do something similar. However, it sometimes decided that my hostid was the MAC address of my Ethernet interface, and sometimes my wireless interface (in which case it would reject the license). In the end I resorted to obtaining two license files and manually switching them when necessary.
jschwartzi 12y ago
TI licenses some of their products based on your MAC address. In the past I've had problems getting their products to accept licenses unless I had an eth0 interface on my Linux system. As in, I had to rename my eth1 interface to eth0 to get it to work at all.

zantana 12y ago

I'd like to see an updated subset with rhel/ubuntu/debian and systemd.

ddingus 12y ago
Seconded.

fit2rule 12y ago

We need one of these for The Web. That'd be a truly revolutionary contribution to the mass-communications zeitgeist: how to communicate to your social sphere, effectively, using email. How to do it with RSS, how to do it with The Web. How to stop doing it with Facebook, et al.

ddingus 12y ago

Just a comment: This page is awesome and I have used the crap out of it in the past. Once, I printed a lot of it on a large format printer so I would have it handy while administering a mixed Unix shop. HP/UX, IRIX, Solaris, Linux...

brendangregg 12y ago

This has been enormously useful, and inspired me to create one for performance metrics (from the USE method): http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-rosetta.html http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-rosetta.html

minikites 12y ago

This is very out of date, OS X hasn't used Netinfo Manager since 10.4.