I didn't mean to imply that Unix's longevity was due solely to the user being able to bork his system involuntarily or otherwise. Rather, Unix places tremendous power into the hands of the average user, but foreseeing that such power (root) could be dangerous even in the hands of someone with benign intentions, a user account with limited privileges was a must even back in Unix's heyday in the 70s and 80s.

OSes like Windows and the classic MacOS (680x0 & PowerPC) attempted to hide this power behind a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) interface, and for awhile this did much to alleviate the average Joe's misgivings about using a computer, especially given the fact that at the time, the command line was the preferred method of interacting with the computer; trying to remember the correct syntax of commands, options, parameters, etc, was confusing and tended to put the user off.

However, it turned out this had a distinct disadvantage; much of the advanced functionality needed for data processing was simply not available. MacOS didn't have a CLI at all, and Windows' Command Prompt was simply incapable of much of the functionality that veteran Unix users were used to.

There is no perfect solution for optimal interaction with computers; trade-offs and compromises are an inevitable part of any solution. However, speaking only for myself, I would much rather run the risk of being able to bork my system and have the advanced functionality at my fingertips, than to have some UI designer decide for me what I need from a computer, and under the guise of simplicity, strip away such things as scripting (pipes, redirection, etc.) as well as the plethora of free programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and more recently, Go. I am no programmer, but having these available to me is a great comfort to me as a nerd. I abide by the old saying:

I hope this clears up what I was trying to convey in my previous post.

Happy Slacking!

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That real Unix still exists or we talk about dinosaurs?

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl

PS. Please do not show me clones and derivatives! Instead, show me from where to buy the real UNIX today. IF it still exists.

Yes: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Oh, my! So, the MacOS/X Catalina is a true UNIX?

While I would agree about AIX. This may be a today UNIX. However, I still have some psychological stress from remembering of working with it.

But I swear that it have almost nothing in common with the stories ventilated in this forum about UNIX.

This is a question of money. Membership costs. Apple has enough money to buy membership and to make fans proud UNIX users. On the other hand BSDs finances are not great so in the end Apple OS X is UNIX and BSD's are not..

1 members found this post helpful.

Don't forget Midnight Commander. That is one program I'll never be without.

I'm not saying I never use text-mode programs. Nano, mc, and links are three I use regularly, mostly when I'm maintaining a remote Slackware box via ssh (I have several), or when my Mint machines crash (more often now than in the past, unfortunately) and I have to drop to text mode or use ssh.

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Yeah, mc is my right arm. I don't know how I forgot to mention it. It's the first thing I install on any non-Slackware machines I have to use (Windows included).
Yeah, they're like rabbits... First one, then two, and the next thing you've lost track of how many you have. I had one which I completely forgot about for several months.

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Why don't you find what one must do to get a "real UNIX" today and tell us what we have to do and where we can do such a thing?

It's written here.

This is a good question. It appears to me that the short answer is that the chipset on your video card has to be supported by svgalib.

You cannot use it while in the GUI. You need to boot into runlevel 3, because it needs direct access to the hardware. The next problem is that due to this fact, the seejpeg binary must be run as root or setuid root (i.e: you have to "# chmod 4111 /usr/bin/seejpeg" before it can work for a user).

I can't get it to work on my laptop which is a 3 year old Dell XPS 15. I suspect that this is because the machine has one of those hybrid Intel/NVidia Optimus chipsets, which is clearly unsupported by svgalib.

It works right out of the box on the old AMD machine in my garage which has NVidia nForce 430 (onboard) graphics, using Slackware64-current with Thursday's (25 Jun 2020) updates. But even on that machine, the results seem to be hit-and-miss, depending upon the picture. Some made the monitor give off a high pitched noise and only displayed straight lines. Some displayed without issues.

When all is said and done, it appears to me that the best method for looking at pictures from the CLI in stock Slackware is to use links with the frame buffer driver. It'll allow you to browse your filesystem for pictures and properly displays every picture I tried on the 2 machines I've tried it on so far, and should work with everything that has frame buffer support.

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Thanks for the response. My desktop computer is just using Intel video (i915) and one of the several errors when running as root in a console is "svgalib: ark: Unknown chiptype 0." Your short answer is probably the best.

I read the recent posts in the old (2018) but related thread you've recently posted in. I was successful in using links to view jpeg files.

I've got a nice window(s)/toolchain setup right now for some programming but in a few days after completing my task I'll tear it all down and do some experimenting with seejpeg. If I find anything that may be useful to others I'll post it.

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Keen to hear your results... useful or otherwise!

There is no answer because question is senseless. What is by the way real UNIX in your opinion? UNIX is a paradigm not particular operating system. You can only ask about POSIX compatible system. Eeven Linux is not fully POSIX compatible - and it seems it will never be. Rather is trying to introduce its own standard. At some point similar to POSIX.

UNIX was a real and particular operating system, made for the PDP-11 minicomputers from 1980 era.

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So this what @LuckyCyborg was asking for? I found on internet some time ago UNIX v.7 being exported on modern architecture. I don't ithink t is what really interests @LuckyCyborg. Say, hm ext2 partition size at most 62 MB - how does it sound?