*NIX is the abbreviation of Unix/Linux, and encompasses many Unix like operating system, such as:
- The BSD spin-offs (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD, etc)
- The many flavors of Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, and many many more).
- Minux, the Unix clone that inspired the creation of the Linux kernel.
- Mr. Gates & company even had a *nix, called Xenix.
- See also: Wikipedia entry "Unix-like".
Tangent time! The Wikipedia article states that the * is added to avoid trademark issues, but I disagree and here is why:
The community as a whole will often use portmanteau (combining two words together to make a new word) in naming their creations. Many operating systems even loosely based on the POSIX standard will end in "nix",
making it easier to refer to the collective Unix spawn as "*nix". That is why I use *nix. Side note: Richard Stallman & friends get originality points for preferring recursive acronyms to portmanteau, i.e. GNU (GNUs Not Unix). End tangent.
BSD, GNU/Linux, and Python news, tips, discussion, and tutorials.
Some of the topics to that will likely be covered:
- Various flavors of GNU/Linux
- FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and possibly OpenSolaris
- Programming and scripting (mostly Python)
- System and Network Administration and Security
- Automation of the security and admin bits
- Android Programming (if I get to it)
