Which Linux? xWindows?

I want to use the opportunity to get familiar with UNIX. Any recommendations on which distribution I should try?

 

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If it's Unix you want to try then BSD is the closest thing. If it's Linux you want to try then SuSE.
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You know that OSX is Unix right ? You can learn natively right on your OSX box.
If you mean Linux, I like Ubuntu these days, it has a lot less clutter and bloat than Fedora and "feels" more like OSX and Solaris to me.

 

Yes. I just think it is probably safer to play with UNIX in a sandbox contained by Parallels rather than playing with my core OS. I could be wrong, but that is why I am considering loading a UNIX guest.

 

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Apple used BSD as their base for OSX.
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Which Linux ?

Depends on what you want to do. As others have pointed out OSX is sorta based on BSD with a little MACH kernal thrown in, inherited from NextStep.
Back to your question....
If you want to play with Unix command line stuff then just use OSX and terminal or even X11 if its Xwindows you want to get familiar with.

Remember that Unix is an OS from the late 60's and so its pedigree is command line oriented, then came Window managers/GUIs on top of the *nix underpinnings.
Hard core *nix folks will tell you to learn the *nix commands and you've learned *nix. Others don't make a distinction and only care about the GUI.
Just remember that, technically, the GUI is just a pretty face on the ol' *nix underpinnings and really is separate from the OS itself.

There are various GUI interfaces out there, X11, Gnome, KDE and many many others. So you'll have to figure out just what it is that you want to 'learn'.

You can get most of the popular GUIs in most of the popular distribution of Linux and mostly for free, sans support.
Unix you wil have to pay for and there are several flavors of Unix that are for retail sale.

Assuming that you want Linux, cause its free, you might try a site like http://www.linuxiso.org/ where you can find links to almost all of the Liunux's you'd want to find, both the sites and the distribution media.

There are hundreds of reference sites and forums out there to help with the support of the various distros. I would suggest picking a popular distro, installing and joining the support forums/newsgroups for that particular flavor.

Personally I like SUSE, I know it runs on Parallels and its got a lot of freeware included in the distribution, I prefer the KDE gui but Gnome is also pretty good. Its kind of like editors and underwear, everyone has thier preference.

Hope this helps,
peter

 

As other people have mentioned here: why bother with Parallels at all? Mac OS X _is_ a UNIX system. You can't really mess it up unless you delve into kernel development. But somehow I get the feeling that you're not quite ready for that yet.

So here's some UNIXy things for you to start learning in Mac OS X:

Command-line? Just run /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and voila, there's a UNIX command-prompt (BASH shell) in all it's glory.

Want to do UNIX programming? Grab the Apple developer tools (XCode tools), your favorite UNIX programming book, and have at it.

X Windows? It may already be installed in /Applications/Utilities/X11, but if not, just pop in your Mac OS X install DVD, double-click "Optional Installs", and select X11. The X11 development package is also bundled with the Apple developer tools.

Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, cc/gcc, make, autoconf, m4, lex/flex, yacc/bison, sed, grep, man, UNIX filesystem structure (/dev, /etc, /usr, /var, /tmp, user home directories), open source kernel (Darwin)? All bundled with Mac OS X and the XCode Developer Tools.

I think that just about covers everything which defines a UNIX system.

But don't let all the buzzwords and acronyms hold you back -- go on and learn what UNIX really is and the reason why people love/hate it so much.

 

Thank you all for these wise answers!