Terminal for PC

[kookooshortman55]

I'm taking an intro to computer programming class where we're learning Unix and C. Our instructor demonstrates all of his commands on his Mac, which has a built in terminal. As far as I've heard, PC does not come with a terminal. I was wondering if there was an app that I could download that would mimic the Mac terminal.

I also just got a second hard drive, I was thinking I could dual boot with Linux, but I heard it doesn't use Unix. Any suggestions?

 

[Hugh9191]

Linux is based on Unix, as is OS X.

I'd recommend downloading Ubuntu (IMO the best Linux for a new user) and dual booting.

 

[tlarkin]

cywin is one, but they all suck man just use a VM of Unix it is way better. You can get headless VMs too.

 

[kookooshortman55]

Okay I'll try dual booting. The professor said that Linux was a "Unix-like" system, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Does it have an open terminal like Mac OS does?

 

[tlarkin]

Okay I'll try dual booting. The professor said that Linux was a "Unix-like" system, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Does it have an open terminal like Mac OS does?

Why dual boot, run a virtual machine. I have several Linux VMs on my windows box. No dual booting is for the birds man, virtual machines is where it is at.

 

[Hugh9191]

Okay I'll try dual booting. The professor said that Linux was a "Unix-like" system, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Does it have an open terminal like Mac OS does?

Linux is as much Unix as OS X is.

OS X is also a Unix-like system.

But yes, you can do everything in the terminal in Linux.

 

[tlarkin]

Linux is as much Unix as OS X is.

OS X is also a Unix-like system.

But yes, you can do everything in the terminal in Linux.

It is but it isn't. Linux has a lot of different directories and is like a more expanded version of Unix, while Unix is a more straight forward and basic OS.

 

[Hugh9191]

It is but it isn't. Linux has a lot of different directories and is like a more expanded version of Unix, while Unix is a more straight forward and basic OS.

But it still has the Unix base. I've looked at the actual contents of my OS X drive and it actually seems to hide loads of directories from you, it looked a lot like a Linux file system when browsing through it plugged into my windows machine.

 

[tlarkin]

But it still has the Unix base. I've looked at the actual contents of my OS X drive and it actually seems to hide loads of directories from you, it looked a lot like a Linux file system when browsing through it plugged into my windows machine.

Yes, but Linux has added a crap ton of stuff on top of Unix which is what makes it different. They may both use BASH as the standard shell, but that doesn't mean the path is the same nor are the directories. Like for example you don't ever really see the /opt directory in Unix.

 

[Hugh9191]

Yes, but Linux has added a crap ton of stuff on top of Unix which is what makes it different. They may both use BASH as the standard shell, but that doesn't mean the path is the same nor are the directories. Like for example you don't ever really see the /opt directory in Unix.

Fair enough, is OS X more true to basic UNIX then?

OS X is based on BSD, would that be more true to UNIX? If so maybe FreeBSD or OpenBSD would be better for the OP.

 

[tlarkin]

Fair enough, is OS X more true to basic UNIX then?

OS X is based on BSD, would that be more true to UNIX? If so maybe FreeBSD or OpenBSD would be better for the OP.

No not really, OS X is Apple's version of Unix and it has a whole set of binaries unique to their OS.

It uses the berkley database for open directory and the underlying base technology is based on Next. However, it is Apple's version of Unix.

If you want to learn just Unix you should get Free BSD and download virtual box for free from Sun Microsystems and have a full blown free Virtual Machine of Unix.