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IBM to Offer Linux Software
ChrisKo writes: "Article on how IBM is going to start offering software for Linux" Specifically DB2 and WebSphere. Talks about other Linux related stuff too, and says that Linux is the #2 OS. Not sure who's #1.
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Of course Windows is #1 on your HD! POS won't boot from anywhere else. ;-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
The Reuters author appears to have got it slightly wrong. IBM have been shipping DB2 and several other applications for Linux for some time now. The real news is that IBM are now shipping and supporting it not only on Intel-based clusters, but also on multiple VM instances of Linux on big iron. Enterprise Linux Today explains it better here.
This is a follow-on from IBM's recent announcement of a significant win at Telia, the Swedish telecomms conpany. Telia tossed out a room full of Solaris servers (the exact number seems to vary between articles), and replaced it with one big fault-tolerant hunk of IBM, running multiple Linux VMs.
The term "VM" normally makes one think of Java, but IBM has been doing VMs for a long time. Their mainframe HW lets you runs multiple simultaneous instances of OS, each called a Virtual Machine. You can take down and restart VMs without affecting its neighbor VMs: very handy for 24x7 ops. Each VM gets a dedicated slice of storage and memory, but can share HW infrastructure like I/O.
Until now, you had to use IBM OSes to do this, e.g. VM/VMS, aka OS/390. Now you can do it on Linux. If I were an ISP/ASP, I would find this very interesting. Bravo Alan Cox for making this happen.
I have been excited for some time regarding IBM's interest in Linux, but from what I have seen IMB's involvement in Linux has been dismal at best. In fact one of the reasons I left my last job was because of IBM and Websphere. More about that later.
/..../temp/... directory under websphere was where the *.properties files actually belonged (not documented) and not in the /.../properties/... directory. I have never heard of any product that put essential configuration in a directory called temp before. And this is version 3.5! Also I read some info on websphere and found that it shines in being able to put out 30-60 (dont remember) pages per second over the web. Which is the same as ASP, PHP, mod_perl, etc. Another gripe was that websphere had to be configured via a java gui, so remote administration was going to be a bitch. Java is slow as molasis, but remotely displaying a java application 3 to 400 miles to my box over the net was not my idea of fun. I hated doing that 1 mile with a motif app. Whats more funny is going to IBM's websphere site and look at their "Case Studies". I saw 0 examples of working java Websphere products, the closest was a .jsp page that said come back later. I cannot comment on the commerse suite because I got out of dodge before being inundated with it. However, it is just a cgi-bin app, and not any kind of embeded technology.
IBM has been "releasing" products for Linux for a while and I have seen little that I consider beyond Alpha quality yet. Some examples the lvm port that was posted here a while back and Websphere.
The lvm was exciting to me because I have felt for some time that Linux needed a more robust and flexable filesystem. I coadmined an AIX box that has lvm and it was too cool to be able to extend volumes that were running out of space at runtime without bringing down the system, yet the IBM lvm port for Linux does nothing as of yet (I guess this is subject to change). But what I downloaded you can create a filesystem and mount it, but could not even do a `ls' on the empty filesystem, nor put files on it. I forget the name for it but the distributed filesystem that IBM released recently is supposedly functional if you could get it to compile and had something much beyond gigabit lan adaptors.
IBM apache. Unfortunately I never ran a diff on it but I have a feeling that there is no difference besides the packaging and saying that it is IBM apache.
Websphere. Beware!!!!! 1st off Websphere is not a product like I thougth for months, but rather a suite of incompatable products. There is the Websphere Commerse product and the Websphere Java product. I was sent by my company out of town to help install a new website that had the Webshere java product as the backend. IBM representatives were there in full force to "help" with this installation, yet they were not familiar with Websphere. After leaving from being out of town for 10 days, I could not see a "Hello World!" servlet that I wrote from the web. After ariving home I was informed that the
Don't get me wrong. I like IBM hardware and AIX. These are some of the best things I have used, but this new stuff is sketchy at best. Side note, the webserver frontends to this project were IBM netfinities running Linux on 4 way 700Mhz Zeon processors with an IBM caching SCSI3 raid controller and SCSI 3 drives. These computers were the fastest that I have EVER touched. Kernel compilation took about 45 secs and I think the bottleneck was the display scrolling, not the CPUs.
YAAC
So is this an anomaly? No - the OSS world understands two kinds of apps:
It doesn't understand professional workstation apps. Thus we get QCad, which is a caricature of a CAD program. There's a lot of room for commercial software there.
well MSFT is definitely the #1 by sales alone.. but maybe we should mention that The Backstreet Boys can make the same claim.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This assumes that Linux's only value is in the fact that it's open source.
There are some people that believe it's simply a better OS, open source or otherwise.
That's not the only point he missed. He seems to think there are free databases, app servers and image manipulation tools under linux that are worth using.
Bah. Get a grip.
Here's the contents of my start menu on W2K:
American McGee's Alice(TM)
Age of Empires II
Office 2000
IE 5.5
VC++ 6
Macromedia DreamWeaver
XMLSpy
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
Fractal Design Painter
Kai's Power Tools
Visio 2000
3D Studio Max
That is all the major apps I have on my W2K partition and Linux has NOTHING to compete with them. (Please dont mention gimp. As big an accomplishment as it is, in a marketplace with photoshop, the gimp is worth more than anyone pays for.)