Hour 24. Variations on the UNIX Theme

You are now done and are an expert on the UNIX operating system. Congratulations!

In this final lesson, I'd like to give you a quick overview of two really cool applications, MachTen for the Macintosh platform, and the MKS Toolkit for Windows 95/98/NT. Both of these let you have a very UNIX-like environment running simultaneously with your favorite operating environment.

I could have talked about different UNIX flavors, listed the four basic types of UNIX you can install on a PC (Linux—my favorite, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSDi), or discussed the other UNIXes you might encounter (Solaris from Sun Microsystems, HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard, AIX from IBM, and so on). If you're like me, however, you'd rather have a strong graphical environment as your desktop. Windows or Macintosh, both have a ton more applications and are easier to use than a desktop version of UNIX.

Sometimes, though, it's really helpful to be able to pop into a command-line interface and utilize all the strengths and flexibility of UNIX. That's why MachTen and the MKS Toolkit are such valuable hybrid tools.