is it me or are a lot of tutorials to general?

I, as somebody who knows basically nothing computers, have become sincerely confused from a lot of tutorials I have been reading about operating systems and hacking (no, not cracking). First, I thought I would use Unix, thinking that "Unix" was basically the same as a title like "Windows", and though it reffered to single operating system by a single company. Than I learned that no, it wasnt a single operating system, their was sunOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. OK, now I got really confused. I went through the website and discovered their are a couple of pretty major differences between these different versions. This means that every time I read the word "Unix" it could refer to any of these or others, which led me very far astray. This entire story about Unix also goes for Linux when i looked it up. Is their a "general" version of Linux or Unix which is the one that these general Unix/Linuxtutorials are referring too? Any help on the subbject would be appreciated.

P.S. I would appreciate it if nobody gave me any really broad answers.

Have a look in the Operating Systems forum - you might find some useful pointers there.

Steve

First of all, tell us what operating systems you are on now. And if you know basically nothing about computers, then it sounds like you need to learn general usage of these operating systems in the first place. You probably won't find many tutorials that will teach you basic usage around here, but you can do what I did-

RAID THE LIBRARY!!!

I found that my local library was stocked with books on linux and it's most popular distros. I spent about 2 months learning out of the books before I could understand most of the stuff that went on around here.

Well,

"Windows" belongs to Microsoft.............there is a hell of a difference between 2.03 and XP!

MacOS belongs to Apple.....................OSX is one hell of a lot different from the early versions?

On this site you will see the expression "*nix" not Unix or Linux...............there are many flavours of these (unix based) OSes as well, both from different suppliers and over time. For example Sun=Solaris, IBM = AIX and these are not even open source?

Either you will get very general tutorials on operating systems or quite specific ones referring to a specific version..............it is up to you to chose.

If you have a computer, it will doubtless have come with an OS already, I suggest that you learn something about that one first?

Cheers

quote:
First, I thought I would use Unix, thinking that "Unix" was basically the same as a title like "Windows", and though it reffered to single operating system by a single company.

There are different versions of the windows operating system, and different versions of linux and unix. Go to the sites below to give you a little history of the three.

http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html
http://www.linux.org/info/
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/windows.htm

The tutorials on this site might be general in scope, but realize that the people that are writing them are probably not technical writers. This might be their first time writing such tutorials. They are doing it on their own time and are not being paid to do it(except for the ones who write them at their regular job) :D Give them some credit for putting forth the effort to write said tutorial.

Look at Gore List of OS

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=254156

Every OS has a link to official mainpage!