[enk0d]

i have been spending the last couple of weeks searching looking around for various posts on various forums about the BSD variant that lies underneath OS X. And i was wondering if the men and women of this forum can give me a little insight about the ibook and using it for unix based tasks or learning unix as proposed to getting a pc based notebook i.e toshiba and putting one of the following on it freebsd/openbsd or netbsd. Would the ibook be the better buy? Or would i get more from running BSD on the toshiba?

[calm]

As you may know Darwin (the backbone of Mac OS X) is based on BSD unix, I recommend it for learning, and experimentation... ;-)

It also allows you to return back to the GUI (if you decided to leave it...) quickly and easily, the iBook is a fine computer, I use it for unix tasks (and everything else), it may be a steep learning curve if you are using UNIX for the first name, you may want to couple it with a easy to use OS - an excellent platform.

Sorry, I may be 'slightly' bais but I run OpenBSD, and other UNIX variants, and (for the moment) I recommend OS X, this is my first post here so I sorry if this doesn't help :-)

[nickgold2012]

You could always also throw Yellow Dog Linux on the iBook in addition to OS X, which would allow you to learn yet another platform. I am getting into the nuts and bolts of OS X, mucking around in bash, etc. My iBook G4 is an ideal platform for this kind of learning -- in fact, it's why I got it. Who wouldn't want to get snuggly in bed with an iBook and a command line shell?

[pat++]

Mac OS X is perfect to learn unix smoothly. And you don't need to have 2 systems installed if you want to use Photoshop or MS Office. Panther even has an X11 server so that you can run applications on remote unix servers and have the dispaly on your iBook. I would definitely go for the iBook. You'll still have a user friendly OS with unix underneath.
As mentionned above, you can still install Linux on the iBook if you really want to experiment with it in addition to OS X.

[enk0d]

Well this is the thing i have been playing around and learning linux from since redhat 7.3 switched over to slackware 9.1 after loading redhat 9 a few months ago.

I am tired of linux i want to learn more about unix and seeing how freebsd, openbsd and netbsd are most peoples favorites i was looking into getting a toshiba to run one of the three so i can learn it. I would like to in time persue my cisco certs and get more into network admin but from a unix stand point not from a linux stand point because linux is unix like and not a true unix OS like BSD and variants of it.

So for someone like myself who wants to persue such a career is the mac os x and ibook g4 933 the way to go? Or would it be better for me to learn the os of my choice directly by either running it in a dual configuration with os x panther? Is it possible and if so how would it be possible because i have never played with os x and their setup like that. i was wondering if the os x would have to be loaded first and the amoutn of space wanting to be used specified then use the rest of freebsd?

Also is there a way one can get the horizontal and vertical refresh sync numbers for the screen?

[baggio]

Originally posted by enk0d:
So for someone like myself who wants to persue such a career is the mac os x and ibook g4 933 the way to go? Or would it be better for me to learn the os of my choice directly by either running it in a dual configuration with os x panther? Is it possible and if so how would it be possible because i have never played with os x and their setup like that. i was wondering if the os x would have to be loaded first and the amoutn of space wanting to be used specified then use the rest of freebsd? [/B]

If you are looking to pursue a career in network administration, I'm not sure that an iBook is the way to go.

*ducks*

MacOS X is great, Apple hardware is great, but I'm not sure if its the best for your situation. First, FreeBSD's support for PPC has not quite ready for prime-time from what I understand, so as for installing FreeBSD on an iBook, I'd forget about it. See:

FreeBSD/ppc Project

Also, if you want to learn Open/Net/Free BSD, go grab a used Pentium-I/II/III for under $500, and throw them on there. They will perform great and its cheap. Also, in a sense, Open/Net/Free BSD are also "Unix-Like", so is Darwin I believe (Not sure about that though). I don't think any of them have gotten licenses from "The Open Group" to call themselves true "Unix". Back in the day, the BSD people were sued by AT&T, and BSD had to remove a bunch of code to create the 4.4BSD-Lite kernel which now all of Open/Net/Free BSD are based on.

If you want to learn a "real" UNIX, you will have to get exposure to Solaris, or AIX - which I believe is safe to say, are the two main UNIX server OSes. Of course, its awfully hard to get exposure to these without actually working at a company that is setup with Sun's or IBM's hardware.

In any case, I wouldn't want to discourage you from getting an iBook or any other mac. They are great computers with a great OS. But if you are interested in learning specifically Open/Net/Free BSD, then get cheap used Intel hardware (don't need anything fancy for the BSDs) instead. If you are interested in learning a "real" UNIX, then you'll probably have to get a job or find some school that will teach you.

[enk0d]

Well that is true as well because if i did want to run bsd on the mac free bsd won't work but openbsd/netbsd well the only thing with that is the airport extreme card won't be able to work seeing how there aren't any drivers for it as yet. Or has someone found a work around for it? I know the regualr airport works but is it worth using the older airport version instead of the extreme?