Well... to start by market share, (grumble, grumble)
Windows XP (can't get 2k any longer), pro and home
Nearly everything else is freely downloadable from somewhere or another without violating copyright. Here's the average boxed prices:
Herm... As far as the Unix's and Unix clones that will run on a PC:
Linux (commercially available in the most common distros of
$40, $200 RedHat, home and pro
$40, $70 Mandrake, a few weird flavors
$50, $200 SuSe, home and pro
$30 Slackware
The BSDs:
$40 FreeBSD
~$30 NetBSD (I've never seen it for sale)
$30 OpenBSD
Sun:
$50 Solaris 8 (x86)
You can do a straight pricing of all of those from
www.compusa.com, others at openbsd.org, slackware.com, sun.com (solaris), and netbsd.org. There's also Unixware, which I think still runs on x86... der... QNX, but that's just free, like I would have to work to find a way to buy it.
For non intel...
BeOS, not really made anymore, they had an x86 port too... hmmm..
Mac OS 9 and OSX, der... compusa again.
HP-UX, HP's UNIX runs on their weird Unix boxen, its so grumpy that peopel sometimes refer to it by exchanging the H and the P.
Amiga is about to put out another OS that will run on the New Mac PPCs.
Solaris on their machines (where it runs best)... the Ultra and the Star series, Sparcs are the older boxen.
OS/2 is pretty much dead as a doornail as IBM is hard backing Linux these days. It runs on Intel of course, and a few other weird architectures.
AIX, IBM's old UNIX, again at death's door.
That's about all I can remember.
Cheers,
Finegan
