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Well, linux is not unix. Technically...

Well, Linux could become Unix. Unix is now a specification, just like POSIX is a specification.

Certain Linux distributions have become POSIX certified, and it is conceivable that certain Linux distributions could some day become Unix certified. All it takes is for someone with deep enough pockets to want it enough.

Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor

Christoph Hellwig has been, according to this web page, "in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree". The page also mentions another fascinating piece of news, that he worked for Caldera for at least part of the time he was making those kernel contributions:

"After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution."

In 2002, he offered a paper on "Linux-ABI: Support for Non-native Applications" which is described like this:

"The Linux-ABI project is a modification to the Linux 2.4 kernel that allows Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

Back in 2002, he was described, in connection with his appearance at the Ottawa 2002 Linux Symposium, like this:

"Christoph Hellwig
"Reverse engineering an advanced filesystem
"Christoph Hellwig is employed by Caldera, working on the Linux-ABI binary emulation modules. In his spare time he cares for other parts of the kernel, often involving filesystem-related activities."

So, in short, he was contributing to the kernel and working for Caldera on Linux/UNIX integration at the same time. His work for Caldera was on the Linux kernel ("he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution"), and he also did work on his own on the kernel. Did Caldera know about his freelance contributions, in addition to knowing about his work for them? What do you think? He used his hch at caldera.de email address when doing it. All contributions to the kernel are publicly available anyway. They certainly could have known. As for his job, his signature on his emails back in 2001 was:

"Christoph Hellwig
Kernel Engineer Unix/Linux Integration
Caldera Deutschland GmbH".

He used the email address hch at bsdonline.org sometimes too, and here you can see some of his Linux-abi contributions. Here are some of his contributions to JFS, Journaled File System. Yes, that JFS. Here he is credited as sysvfs maintainer, and he confirms it in this email, writing, "I've run native sysvfs tools under linux, but as now that I'm Linux sysvfs maintainer I'm looking into implementing free versions of it."

Here is a list of the operating systems that use or can handle the file system sysvfs:

"sysvfs: UNIX System V; SCO, Xenix, Coherent e21
"operating systems that can handle sysvfs: FreeBSD (rw), LINUX (R), SCO (NRWF)"

Here's a page listing by author (alphabetically by first name), with his emails to linux-kernel in June 2003, so he is still contributing.

Here he is listed on the Change log for patch v2.4.17. Here he tells Andrew Morton in 2002 that he will

Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor

Christoph Hellwig has been, according to this web page, "in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree". The page also mentions another fascinating piece of news, that he worked for Caldera for at least part of the time he was making those kernel contributions:

"After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution."

In 2002, he offered a paper on "Linux-ABI: Support for Non-native Applications" which is described like this:

"The Linux-ABI project is a modification to the Linux 2.4 kernel that allows Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

Back in 2002, he was described, in connection with his appearance at the Ottawa 2002 Linux Symposium, like this:

"Christoph Hellwig
"Reverse engineering an advanced filesystem
"Christoph Hellwig is employed by Caldera, working on the Linux-ABI binary emulation modules. In his spare time he cares for other parts of the kernel, often involving filesystem-related activities."

So, in short, he was contributing to the kernel and working for Caldera on Linux/UNIX integration at the same time. His work for Caldera was on the Linux kernel ("he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution"), and he also did work on his own on the kernel. Did Caldera know about his freelance contributions, in addition to knowing about his work for them? What do you think? He used his hch at caldera.de email address when doing it. All contributions to the kernel are publicly available anyway. They certainly could have known. As for his job, his signature on his emails back in 2001 was:

"Christoph Hellwig
Kernel Engineer Unix/Linux Integration
Caldera Deutschland GmbH".

He used the email address hch at bsdonline.org sometimes too, and here you can see some of his Linux-abi contributions. Here are some of his contributions to JFS, Journaled File System. Yes, that JFS. Here he is credited as sysvfs maintainer, and he confirms it in this email, writing, "I've run native sysvfs tools under linux, but as now that I'm Linux sysvfs maintainer I'm looking into implementing free versions of it."

Here is a list of the operating systems that use or can handle the file system sysvfs:

"sysvfs: UNIX System V; SCO, Xenix, Coherent e21
"operating systems that can handle sysvfs: FreeBSD (rw), LINUX (R), SCO (NRWF)"

Here's a page listing by author (alphabetically by first name), with his emails to linux-kernel in June 2003, so he is still contributing.

Here he is listed on the Change log for patch v2.4.17. Here he tells Andrew Morton in 2002 that he will

I hope this illiterate drivel was intended as a troll, but just in case it was not:

Forget Java man and go to PHP!

Java is a general purpose programming language, PHP is not. PHP is a scripting language designed for server side web scripting. Ever tried writting a server in PHP? You can't, it doesn't let you accept incomming socket connections.

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).
This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language.

PHP is not an OO language. PHP supports a few features of OO, but not the vast majority (public / private methods, inheritence etc). PHP Classes are more equivalent to namespaces than classes.

PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java.

PHP is an interpreted language (how many times do I have to say this?). There is a virtual machine, and it interprets the PHP script. The Java VM compiles the bytecode to native code at run time (and only once, when the JRE is started in server mode). <oversimplification>

Nothing can beat "C" language

This is the stupidest statement I have ever heard. C does nut support dynamic strings, so only a fool or a masochist would use it for simple text manipulation tasks (ever written a CGI script in C?). C has many advantages, it's a mature language so a lot of work has gone into making it fast. For this reason it is good for low level system work. It is not the best tool for every job. If the only tool you have is C, every problem looks like an operating system...

Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Java programmers will loath PHP. It doesn't properly support a large number of features found in Java, because it is not a general purpose language, and it isn't even an OO language. Web developers like PHP because it's simple. For a detailed criticism of PHP look at thi paper published at the UK Unix Users' Group last year. (And possibly read my reply to the criticisms made.

The aim of java was to abstract the OS and windowing system away from the developer, and in this it succeeds quite well (although it still has speed issues and the API is baroque in the extreme in places - try creating a non-blocking port in Java if you don't believe me). PHP is an interpreted scripting language aimed at web design, which has agregated, rather than being designed. Comparing the two is a crazy as saying Mozilla is far better than Linux.

I floated the idea in the newsletter and providing a SSL certificate for free as part of membership was well received. To make this work, I need lots of other UUGs to join with UKUUG and share the cost of becoming a SSL signing authority, I would like to get the cost down to about $1/member.

Questions:

1. Am I missing something that would turn this into a bad idea, or would cost too much ?
2. I want other UUGs to contact me and talk about possible agreement to spread the cost (no committment at this stage).

Please email me at: addw AT phcomp DOT co DOT uk

Yes, and where the editorial begins....

Looking back at NT's history, Microsoft made a lot of noise about POSIX certification and a "C2" security certification. In both cases, the purely objective news ended with the fact that they obtained these certification. In both cases, purely objective reporting would lead the poor reader to believe that NT 3.51 was compatible with unix applications and was highly secure.

It later became well known that the C2 security was for a very limited system without a network interface and without even a floppy drive (and even then there were some very serious questions about it). Much can also be said of how useless the POSIX subsystem was. The true story in both cases was in the editorial... "yes, it's certified, but that means nothing because [insert reasons]".

Saddly, there doesn't seem to be much well informed editorial yet. Maybe it's lurking waiting to be mod'd up? Maybe in several days or weeks ugly truths will come out? Those conjectures are based on Microsoft's previous use of (useless) certifications as a marketing tool, and their very poor record on security. Can those previous mis-representations of certifications be considered propaganda (yes, according to dictionary.com it doesn't even matter if the info is false, misleading, or honest... though the common usage of the word implies some misrepresentation which is exactly what Microsoft did in the past with their meaningless POSIX and C2 certs). Still, it may turn out that this certification really is meaningful (but that's not how I'd wager in a bet).

Correct me on this, but I don't remember Linux getting an ISO certification about anything.

http://www.ukuug.org/sigs/linux/newsletter/linux@u k21/posix.shtml

Um 1962, the ATLAS had it.

The machine, unlike its predecessors, did not have a clock in the central processor. It was felt that to tie down everything to the slowest operation, which was implied by the use of a clock, would be against the principle of the machine. Instead a single Pre-Pulse wandered round the various elements of the machine where it would initiate an action and wait for the self timing of the action to complete before wandering off to the next element. Occasionally it would initiate an action and move on to another element that could operate concurrently. For example the floating-point arithmetic unit would be completing a division operation whilst the program would be executing several fixed-point operations. Also there was a pipeline between the processor and the main core store.

Kudos to Ferranti, Plessey and the University of Manchester who did a lot of the design work.

In the same line as this quote, it's interesting to note the Dutch produced such painters as Van Gogh and Rembrandt and M.C. Escher

Albeit the dutch also had plenty of wars, conflicts, and even pirates, both in the true, historical sense and in the modern sense of the word.

So, in context, were the patent laws a major factor in each countries development?

SInce then after passing through PDP 11s (some of these had some lovely 'paddle' switches to toggle stuff in) to VAXes I became more and more deprived of this original stimulus to enjoy computing, heck, even the LAN switches are losing their lights now!!!!!

Ok, on my high end servers I can enter console routines and fiddle with the CPU examing and depositing to registers and memory (even dissassembling code), but that isn't so much fun.

Back on topic, yes, there is a place for a low profuleand quiet box in my living room, but I don't like dead server rooms. If I have a room of computers doing things, I too like to have a feel of what they are doing.

There's a DNS Tutorial by Jim Reid of Nominum the copany responsible for the offical support of BIND. I assume he'll be mentioning the changes in BIND 9 at this event.

Why open source it? Because coda is about to replace it.

At UKUUG this year, Owen LeBlanc, a Coda expert if there ever was one, said "if you have a small number of users and a relatively small amount of data, then Coda may be just what you need". I also seem to recall him saying he thought AFS is pretty darn nice. He'd be the one to know.
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If you're an employee in a company that is interested in E-commerce but thinks MS is the way to go then tell your boss about this event.

The talk was "The Design and Implementation of a Large Scalable Mail Server". It's about the mail cluster I set up here for Oxford University and it sounds similar to what the original request was for. We have about 30000 users. I successfully argued against MS Exchange and designed and built a completely Open Source solution based on a Linux cluster with 250GB of disk, UW imapd/ipopd, Exim (MTA) and an Apache/mod_perl-based web to mail gateway that I wrote called WING. The two Solaris nodes in the cluster were there for political reasons and are being replaced by Linux boxes within the next few weeks. There is a WING web page and mailing list which includes a link to the PostScript slides of the talk. The slides will also be shortly be available from UKUUG.

At the UKUUG Linux '99 conference there was a presentation explaining how they implemented a large scalable mail server using open source software. It was also explained how the total cost of ownership would be much higher if they used an NT solution (even using the figures supplied by MS they'd need more machines and more administrators to keep the servers runnig).

The open source solution was much more cost effective and has proved fairly stable.

Unfortunately the proceedings from the event are not yet online, however I'll try and forward you a copy (or post a link to this thread) as it may prove useful to you.
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Brunel University in West London runs Samba for all our NT workstations (several hundred on 4 campuses, hitting a thousand soon). We don't use the PDC function though. We run Samba and NIS on Sun Solaris and replace the NT Login GINA with something called NISGina, which uses NIS servers for user authenication. See: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~ccusrdt/win ntnisgina/

Samba's working well, a recent test had 344 users accessing 600+ shares on one Ultra 5 with 192MB RAM. The NISGina code still has one annoying bug with Service Pack 3, but SP4 & 5 seem to clear it up. One server crash in the past year, a new Ultra, which was suspected to a hardware problem.

Our biggest headaches are caused by MS products, getting MS Office 97 to run from a read-only network drive, getting NT workstation to only use DNS, dll versions, file & registry permssions.

If anyones interested Peter Polkinghorne, the Unix Systems guy who looks after Samba here, is giving a talk on Samba at the UK Unix User's Group Linux conference: http://www.linux.ukuug.org/linux99/

Why doesn't one of the UK's supporters of Linux such as the UK UNIX users group (UKUUG) offer to assist any ISP who wants to offer Linux support in return for a small fee which would go to the organising of conferences. Alternativly the UKUUG could team up with some other major UK Linux organisations and put the capital together to offer such a service. Personally I'd like to see an ISP that actually supports Linux rather than one that just works with Linux.

--
Richard Stallman
Free Lecture at the Commonwealth Institute, London W8
Tuesday 23rd March, 1999 at 7.00 p.m. - 9.00 p.m
Sponsored by UKUUG

--
Richard Stallman
Free Lecture at the Commonwealth Institute, London W8
Tuesday 23rd March, 1999 at 7.00 p.m. - 9.00 p.m
Sponsored by UKUUG