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A UnixWare That Can Run Linux Apps
rafa writes: "Caldera seems to have some interesting plans for UnixWare, the operating system they acquired from SCO. Using SCO's Linux Kernel Personality software, they can run Linux software on UnixWare. This might also be used in AIX 5L, according to Ransom Love." The Caldera folks have been talking about this for a long time; what remains to be seen is whether enough customers are interested in the hybrid commercial / Free software system to pay the premium for it. The article quotes Ransom Love as downplaying the touted features of 2.4, saying, "It will probably take another three years to build a [truly enterprise-ready] Linux kernel."
The fact that so many Linux users can remain so ignorant about the system which Linux ripped off is astounding.
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Ellison: How are you gentlemen !! All your database are belong to us
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I like to watch.
a [truly enterprise-ready] Linux kernel."
and what he really meant to say;
"It will be three years before linux has all the wizards that windows has"
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Why wouldn't they just recompile the GNU userspace to run natively?
No, this is an incredibly shrewd move to allow UnixWare to run all of those closed source binaries that are built for Linux like... umm... well I can't think any right now, but I'm sure there are loads.
Oh wait, I got it! Quake!
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Australia the only commercial Unix that is alive and kicking is Solaris. HPUX and SCO are on their death beds. Digital Unix, AIX and Unixware are nearly unheard of.
Here in the states, I work in a shop that is about 50/50 split between HPUX and Linux, with a smattering of FreeBSD and Solaris (well, and file/print sharing is mostly NT, but I hardly ever have to get anywhere near it). It used to be that HPUX ran all the workhorse applications, but recently we've been moving some pretty large web/database applications to Intel/Linux. The HP9000s aren't going away anytime soon because, from a hardware perspective, they're more mature, reliable servers in a lot of ways. But as an OS, I think everyone has been a lot happier with Linux (even the BSD guy who still complains that he can't do a 'ps -ef' in Linux).
Overall, I agree with you that Solaris is the biggest commercial Unix by a large amount. Though there ARE plenty of people out there using that Sun hardware to run Sparc Linux...
As for Unixware, I'm not sure I see the point of Linux compatibility, but I do have a certain respect for Unixware as an OS. I admined a few Unixware boxes back when it was still a Novell property, and it was a good, by-the-book SYS5 implementation with a decent packaging system added on. This was back around '95, when most bosses would just sort of give you an amused look if you suggested running any sort of production server on Linux.
> "Enterprise-ready" is an E10k with 64 CPUs,
> 64GB of RAM, a and multi-terabyte SAN.
I suspect this is not the definition used by SCO when describing the advantages of UnixWare.
In any case, IBM can deliver Linux based solutions with that kind of power, and better support.
There's also a huge installation base of Unixware systems that Caldera would like to hold on to. These are mostly telephone embeded systems. When AT&T was a monopoly, computerized switches and voice mail systems were mostly Western Electric 3B systems running Bell Labs Unix. Lucent inherited that business, and even though they're not a monopoly, they're pretty strong. The systems now run commodity processors, but the OS is still Bell Labs Unix -- or rather its commercial successor, Unixware.
Do you have an AT&T or Lucent phone on your desk? Audix voice mail? Believe it or not, there's at least one Unixware box in your building.
Now, I don't know how tied Lucent is to Unixware. But they must be a possibility, however remote, that they would switch to Linux: no license fees, bigger developer community. Plus Lucent has competitors, some of whom do use Linux. Caldera needs to offer Linux compatibility just to hold onto all those license fees they get from Lucent.
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In all fairness to Caldera, the CEO wasn't comparing linux to win2k. He was comparing linux to other unix OS's.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Linux gives you *no* options about which toolkit to run. You have to run whichever one your apps use. If you're app uses more than one, too bad, you have to run that one. Plus, more toolkits means more incompatible features. Printing, for example. If you run GNOME and KDE, you've got three printing layers, the one in X, the one in GNOME, and the one in KDE. All of that is totally wasted, redundant code. It saps performance and keeps apps from interoperating. Take, for example, the case of EVAS. From my POV, the Linux desktop has some good features. It has the nice, fast network model and multi-media API in KDE, it has the broad application-base (GIMP), corporate support, and visual quality (I like GNOME's art better, KDE is too cartoony) in GNOME, and it has nifty features like accelerated desktops with EVAS (enlightenment.) Unfortunately, no-one app can take advantage of all of these features, because they're not in the same GUI environment. That's just a waste of a lot of good code. Things would be so much nicer if they'd unify the toolkit APIs and work on inerchangable back-ends. The API could be something like GNOME's that could have lots of language wrappers, and if it were well designed, the developers couldn't complain too much about being forced to use it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The fact that you even mention NT as an example of an "enterprise-ready" system shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. NT5 only runs on x86 hardware, which I don't acknowledge as a platform for doing anything but playing Quake 3 or running "myhomepage.com".
"Enterprise-ready" is an E10k with 64 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, a and multi-terabyte SAN. "Enterprise-ready" is an RS/6000 farm. And to me, "enterprise-ready" is real UNIX. Linux lacks scalablity[1] on non-trivial (read: non-x86) hardware and widespread commercial software support. And decent threads! (Ask anyone who's had to port large UNIX software packages to Linux.)
Another problem with Linux is that the historically best distributions (such as Debian) have no corporate accountability, while the commercially popular distributions (such as Red Hat) are buggy-as-hell and dumbed-down.
Don't get me wrong, I use and enjoy Linux... but I'm a UNIX guy at heart and it pains me to see companies such as SCO say that Linux is competitive with UNIX, which IMNSHO it is not. Real UNIX is not only guaranteed to work better than anything else on your vendor's non-trivial hardware, but it will also comply with a large number of open standards that Linux hasn't even approached yet. Each of our ten RS/6000 cages contains about $800,000 of hardware; the cost of UNIX is insignificant, and the advantages are innumerable. The only place for Linux in our datacenter is embedded in our routers.
Offtopic: While I am a UNIX zealot, I like much of RMS's philosophy and use a lot of GNU software. In fact, I refer to my UNIX boxes as "GNU/SunOS": SunOS/Solaris with a full GNU development suite. Incredibly slick. Free Software rules, Open Source drools.
Oh well, no one on this site listens anyway...
[1] And on x86, it only scales well to 4 CPUs, but anyone who is going to waste their money on a (NUM_OF_CPU >= 8) x86 box deserves what he gets.
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Ellison: How are you gentlemen !! All your database are belong to us
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I like to watch.
Part of being "enterprise ready" is that you need to guarantee 100% quality to the customer/client. I'm _not_ saying that Linux can't provide this. However, the businesses that want to provide such a guarantee need their "insurance". This "insurance" is typically a vendor guarantee.
If E-garbage-mart run in a Tandem system they _know_ that if they can't run their business because of a problem with the Tandem servers they know that it'll be fixed in 4 hours, or they get compensation. I believe DEC used to offer _1 hour_ onsite support in some parts of Europe (Germany).
(This means that they needed a dozen sites in the country with people on call 24/7.)
If companies offer cold hard "99.995% uptime" guarantees on Linux systems with compensation terms, then people will consider them Enterprise ready. Not one line of code needs to change - simply that fact that someone is willing to _fiscally_ underwrite it.
FatPhil
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Funny stuff. I recently tried to upgrade the glibc 2.2.2 test release to 2.2.2 and it broke ls of all things!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
(even the BSD guy who still complains that he can't do a 'ps -ef' in Linux)
My good friend Wes taught me that you can set the I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS environment variable in Linux to allow ps-ef. Here's a quick snippet of the Linux ps man page:
Set the I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS environment variable to force BSD syntax even when options are preceeded by a dash.
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True, but (if Unix means Unix-like) you don't mean commercial Unix.
You mean closed source or proprietary Unix. Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake etc are all commercial entities whose Unix-like OS exists for the purposes of making them money.
Real Server, Windows Media Server (yes), about ten databases unavaliable on SCO, some scripting language plugins for Apache, and indeed, every Loki game, RealPlayer, Flash Player, etc on the desktop. That's off the top of my head. There are more.
Some Linux users use it for the same reasoin they use closed soruce apps on it: because its the best tool for the job.
as I can run gnome stuff in KDE and vice versa.
But you can't.
* xdnd is poor, and doesn't often work. Try xdnd from konq FTP to a gnome desktop.
* panel applet imcompatibility
* mime type incompatibility
* doubled learning time from two sets of common controls, completely diffferent visual styles
* Component level incompatibility
* A stack more reasons I can't think of right now
The integration between the two is, frankly, a load of shite. yes there's room for two, but now with the current l;evel of incompatibility. Lackk of consistency hurts the Linux desktop far more than competition is currently enhancing it.
I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Australia the only commercial Unix that is alive and kicking is Solaris. HPUX and SCO are on their death beds. Digital Unix, AIX and Unixware are nearly unheard of.
Why? Having several options for graphical toolkits really can't hurt as long as I can run gnome stuff in KDE and vice versa.
I can see why people would prefer Qt (I do), but I can also see why people who have never done C++ would prefer gtk rather than learning a "new language" - why not give people both (or even more) options?
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x86 scales to 8 fine, IIS 5.0 (I know, there is no reason to have an 8 way web server) and Exchange 2k scale that high fine. Unisys did 8000 E2k users per partition a 4 way partitioned 32 cpu machine in an active-active cluster.
ostiguy
"It will probably take another three years to build a [truly enterprise-ready] Linux kernel."
But by then 2.6 will almost be ready for release! That'll be a tough act for Caldera to follow...
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Wow. with the number of businesses already using Linux, that's a rather interesting statement. (3 years for an enterprise-ready kernel)
An enterprise-ready kernel implies one suitable for running banking systems & very large database systems on. It would also imply a featureset much like Digital Tru64 or Solaris, with failover clustering etc.
With the best will in the world, I'm not sure Linux is currently at this stage, and I do not think it will be for a few years either.
Many businesses deloying Linux as web servers, firewalls, or file servers does not make Linux an enterprise-class platform.
Daniel
Enterprise ready doesn't mean merely 'suitable for use by a big company with a big budget'.
Big companies use Win95 still.. does that make it enterprise-ready?
And just cause it runs print servers or departmental file servers doesn't make it enterprise ready either.
Do banking systems run on it? Real-time transaction processing for stock markets? Critical insturment control for nuclear power plants/other major industries? No....
That's what they mean by 'enterprise-ready' in this context; the ability to stake the data of your whole enterprise on it.
Installing it and administering it, you really get the feeling that a whole bunch of people were paid a whole bunch of money to spend months and months going over every inch of it, dotting every 'i' and crossing every 't', making sure everything worked together properly and that everything was consistent and uniform and complied with their policies on how things should be laid out. With Redhat, there's always the feeling that it's just a bunch of stuff that they threw together and stuck on a CD.
I use Debian but I would not hesitate to recommend Caldera to someone who wanted to deploy Linux in a business environment (or just for personal use). It's too bad that they aren't more popular than they are (anyone know the market share percentages for the various distros? Not that it matters, it'd just be interesting to see the figures).
Maybe this will be the GNU userspace on the Unixware kernel, which would be OK. The major niceness of Linux has always been its userspace moreso than the kernel itself. Lots of people install a load of GNU software on their Solaris boxen for this reason. It's the final patch to make Solaris a usable system, so to speak...
Or maybe they'll do something stupid and just emulate Linux with Unixware...
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