Originally Posted By: Y_K
Where has linux come from? BSD userland and the kernel is from another project. Just educating myself..
The Linux kernel was written in the early 90's by a (then) young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. The userland is almost all from the GNU project. The handful of BSD projects (FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, plus their few derivatives) all use the BSD kernel and userland.
As I understand it, Apple *based* Darwin (their kernel) on BSD, then built a graphics engine on top of that (as opposed to the X server that BSD and Linux's use).
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
However Apple is not the only company to have a price tag associated with a *nix variant. RHEL is a "paid-for" Linux distribution. But you pay for the service/support, not the actual software.
And Red Hat has Fedora, too, to use as a testing ground. You can also run Scientific or CentOS to have an exact clone of Red Hat, sans branding. Canonical also charges to support Ubuntu; but unlike Red Hat they offer the exact same product without charge.
Originally Posted By: Dave Sherman
I had to find out about VLC just to watch .wmv files since Quicktime couldn't handle them. Overpriced? Maybe, but my most recent Windows machine could be called that too for as quirky as it is sometimes and for the lack of documentation and support.
Microsoft has software called "Flip4Mac" that provides .wmv playback, and there is a collection of codecs, similar to the CCCP codec pack, called "Perian". These will enable reasonable playback of most formats from within Quicktime (and QuickLook via Finder). VLC is awesome, of course; and there is also a Mplayer port to Mac called (something to the effect of) Mplayer OSX Extended.
