Ransom Love on United Linux, SCO Unix

tit4tat writes: "Caldera chief executive Ransom Love confessed to ZDNet UK that "[Caldera is] not moving Open Unix [i.e., the former SCO Unix] onto Intel's 64-bit platform...." I suspected that Caldera bought SCO just to kill SCO Unix, even though they denied it at the time. Now, the first Unix I ever knew is about to be no more. "

Comments

SCO is gone

[codeguy007]

Well considering that SCO sucked why would they ever want to port it to IA-64. No they didn't by SCO to kill it. It was going to die anyway. They bought it for the Intellectual Property and some of the application software that SCO had developed. Also I understand they were interested in SCO's support division.

title

[Dionysus]

For some reason I read it as Random Love Unites Linux...

good riddance

[Roadmaster]

At long last, and hopefully every single one of my sco-using customers will finally see a reason to migrate from that.

SCO has got to be the single ugliest, un-friendliest, most incomplete and failure-prone unix i've ever used. I was called in to solve problems even the dedicated admins couldn't, and they always turned out to be windows-like, unexplainable glitches that took lots of kludging around to fix.

Caldera's Not Killing Off SCO!

[BlueLines]

*sigh*

(from the article)

So OpenUnix will continue in parallel to OpenLinux?
Yes. Open Unix could well keep going in parallel to OpenLinux. We are not moving Open Unix onto Intel's 64-bit platform, but IA32 will be around for a long time yet.

Please read the articles before you post them....

-BlueLines

SCO should die

[juan2074]

the first Unix I ever knew
more like, the worst Unix I ever knew

ScoAdmin

[Da_man]

I have never used SCO Unix but I have a lot of experience with OpenServer. IMHO "scoadmin", the tool administring everything on a sco box, was a work of art.

The transparent (to the user) method it had for Kernel compiles is something I would love to see Linux do. Not that I haven't cut a few Linux kernels myself, but it was very neat.

Another great thing was the software installer, and driver support from major manufacturers. Download drivers from Compaq, go to scoadmin/software, add the new software and it would recompile the kernel if needed. Sweet!!

Why I will never use United Linux...

[bogie]

Ransom Love

" The only difference is that the UnitedLinux binaries will not freely distributed. People will be able to download the source code and compile their own binaries, but they will not be able to use the UnitedLinux brand"

Please people now is the time to rally behind the truely free distros out there. If your going to use linux use Redhat,Debian,Gentoo,Slackware,Mandrake, or any of the other fine binary/iso friendly distros out there.

While I applaud standards I don't think this is the way to go about it.

Re:Why I will never use United Linux...

[Jason Earl]

Exactly right. This is nothing more than yet another wacky hare-brained Caldera scheme to get people to pay more for Free Software without having to actually do more. United Linux is nothing more than a binary version of the LSB plus some additional, fairly basic, packages. Each of the distributions that is participating will have these packages installed and available. Clearly this is not a revolutionary idea. Caldera, and their new compadres are trying to set this package up to be the "new standard" because they know that otherwise folks will continue to use RedHat as the de-facto standard.

However, Caldera continues to overlook the reason that RedHat became the de-facto standard. That reason is simple. They wrote cool software and gave it away. Because of RedHat's policy of writing GPLed software, their software became the standard and their technology has been adopted by pretty much every other distribution (in one form or another). By and large Linux users, and Linux customers in general, aren't interested in being locked into a single distribution. Nor are they interested in paying per seat licensing fees. Apparently they also aren't interested in purchasing support from companies that sell distributions that rely on such tactics.

You would think that years of being beaten over the head with a clue stick by the folks at RedHat would have knocked some sense into Mr. Love, but apparently some folks are just amazingly slow learners.

No Weeping here.

[LowellPorter]

The wholesale company I work for used SCO Unix for 12 years. Our customers would dial into it with our windows software to order product. The last few years was a real pain in the butt. SCO Unix didn't have many device drivers, was hard to install even with the recommended hardware, and crashed too often.
Four years ago when I started working for the company, I recommended Linux. My boss didn't want to use it because at the time there were no companies that had decent support. Last year we finally switched to Red Hat. They have decent support. The only big problem with RH is being able to install from a backup tape. SCO unix had utilities for this that worked well. With Linux this is much more difficult.
We have been more than satisfied since the switch to Red hat.
Good Riddance to SCO. It was good at one point, but they let it fall to peices.

ransom note

[jeffehobbs]

wE hAVe YoUR UniX. PlaCE tWEnty
THOusaNd DolLarS IN UnMArkeD
hUNdreD DollaR BiLLs in OuR
PaypAL AccouNT By JuNE 1St
or wE WiLL kiLL -9 IT.

~jeff

Differently Colored Virt. Terminal (Was: ScoAdmin)

[markus]

Another cool thing about SCO (out of the 3 good things I can say about it) was that the colors of vitual terminals changed. When we migrated to Linux my boss hits ctrl+alt+F2 and says "Hey, they're all the same color!". Is there a way to do this in Linux? it's actually sort of usefull...

Of course you can do this. This is just a question of configuring your system properly. You need to edit your /etc/inittab and add apropriate -I parameters for your getty processes:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0681800'
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0686800'
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0005078'
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0681868'
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0006818'
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6 -I 'ESCcESC[?17;55;248cESC]RESC]P0006878'

Make sure that you enter a literal escape character for ESC (in vi you do this by preceding it with a CTRL-V, in emacs you must press CTRL-Q first).

After you have made these changes restart all your getty processes:

telinit q
killall -HUP getty

If you want to know what the escape sequences do, then here you go:

• ESCc clears the screen.
• ESC[?17;55;248c gives you a non-blinking red block cursor.
• ESC]R resets the current palette to its default values.
• ESC]P0RRGGBB changes the color for the first entry in the palette (i.e. for the background color).

Re:Not well known

[edhall]

It's not well known, because it isn't true.

Sun's OS derived directly from BSD. One of Sun's founders, Bill Joy (now their Chief Scientist), was one of the primary developers of BSD and one of the people responsible for getting BSD to run on the 68000 (which was the processor used in the first Suns).

At the time, Apollo didn't even run Unix, but rather their own OS named "Domain." To compete, Apollo modified Domain to support a Unix emulation (including a switching mechanism based on conditional symlinks). Domain didn't die until HP bought Apollo, though I believe they did ultimately port native Unix to Apollos just before then.

-Ed