[svlug] Linux OS, Why?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jennifer Davis (sigje at sigje.org):

> NetBSD runs on the most platforms....

Could be.  It depends on one's criteria.  The guy I shave wrote (at
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO-1.html):

  Linux is a freely-distributable implementation of Unix for personal
  computers, servers, workstations, PDAs, and embedded systems. It was
  developed on the i386 and now supports a huge range of processors from
  tiny to colossal:

    * Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
          o Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110,
            XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, 
            ARM720T, and ARM920T)
          o Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
          o Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced
            Instruction Set RISC architecture)
          o Elan SC520 and SC300
          o Fujitsu FR-V
          o Hitachi H8 series
          o Intel i960
          o Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics
            STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
          o Matsushita AM3x
          o MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series,
            Realtek 8181)
          o Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards,
            ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, 
            and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
          o Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II,
            III families)
          o NEC V850E
          o Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH)
          o Samsung CalmRISC
          o Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
    * Intel 8086 / 80286.
    * Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II,
      Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as
      IA32 clones from AMD (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
      486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Elan, K5, K6/K6-II/K6-III),
      Cyrix (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
      486DLC/DLC2/DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Cyrix III), IDT
      (Winchip, Winchip 2, Winchip 2A/3), IBM
      (486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2), NexGen (Nx586), Transmeta
      (Crusoe), TI (486DLC/DLC2), UMC (486SX-S, U5D/U5S), VIA (C3 Ezra
      "CentaurHauls", C3-2 "Nehemiah"), and others.
    * Intel/HP IA64: Trillian, Itanium, Itanium2/McKinley
    * x86-64 x86-64 family including AMD Hammer/Opteron/K8/Athlon64 and
      Intel Prescott/Nocona/Potomac
    * Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari
      ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and
      Sinclair Q40.
    * Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) /
      CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400,
      RS/6000, iSeries, pSeries, PowerMac G5).
    * MIPS: most SGI, Cobalt Qube, DECStation, Sony PlayStation2, and
      many others
    * DEC Alpha
    * HP PA-RISC
    * SPARC International SPARC32 / SPARC64
    * Digital VAX minicomputers and MicroVAXen
    * Mainframes: IBM S/390 models G5 and G6 / zSeries models z800,
      z890, z900, and z990 and Fujitsu AP1000+ (SuperSPARC cluster)

  Note that some items listed were probably one-time forks, little or not
  at all maintained since creation. On some of the rarer architectures,
  NetBSD [link] may be more practical. (Soon, the Debian GNU/NetBSD [link] 
  port should be solid enough to serve as a compromise option, furnishing 
  Linux userspace code on the highly portable NetBSD kernel.)

  If seriously interested in the subject of Linux ports, please see also
  Xose Vazquez Perez's Linux ports page [link] and Jerome Pinot's Linux
  architectures list [link], if only because hardware support is more
  complex than just generic CPU functionality, encompassing support for
  myriad bus variations and other subtle hardware issues (especially for
  Linux PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router ports). The above list
  aims mostly to generally illustrate the breadth of Linux's reach.