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SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 Review
JigSaw writes "Despite news about SCO being all about the lawsuit, they still sell OS products and they have a presence in the server market. UnixWare is one of these OS products. Tony Bourke reviewed its latest version, 7.1.3, and even includes benchmarks among other tests. Tony concludes that 'the lack of commercial applications and user community, the difficulty with open source applications, the SCO litigation, and the high price are all marks against UnixWare. There are just very few reasons to adopt UnixWare as your platform, and plenty of reasons to adopt (or migrate to) other platforms.'"
McDonalds, last I knew, had thousands of terminals running SCO in their locations. Retail is their biggest presence. I also used to work somewhere (a non-profit) that had an old Informix database running on an even older SCO box.
Not that I support it or anything... =]
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
First off, why is such a worthless OS front page news on /.? SCO Unix is mediocre, and nobody would even think of using it. The only reason a SCO Unix review is on /. is because of the lawsuit hubbub.
I was poking through the SCO web site some time ago, to find good stuff for my SCO Report website and I discover SCObiz. Check it out. For $5,000, they'll basically give you a template site, with mediocre ecommerce ability. The datasheet is here (pdf), while the quick facts (pdf) is here. A Flash tour is here.
The Flash tour is pretty snappy, but you can tell, it's nothing more than a glorified template driven website builder for newbies, similar to what Tripod and Geocities provide with their drag and drop stuff. It's probably even worse.
Remember to visit SCO Report, where I do my part to annoy SCO with the truth, and SCO Countdown, where there are clocks counting down to SCO's demise...
UnixWare isn't a Linux distro.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The only SCO systems I've heard of in memory are POS systems. No, not Piece Of Shit, Point Of Sale.
/. when someone admits to using SCO and mentions what the deployment was, it's cash registers.
In your local Round Table Pizza, for example, long after everyone goes home for the night they might have a small computer that gathers receipt information from all the cash registers, makes a 14.4K modem call to a "mainframe" at headquarters, and uploads the sales data for that day. Every time on
Anyway. The point is that their brand getting tarnished is completely meaningless to this market. If they do what they say they'll do, Round Table will use them until some sales guy for some competitor (in point of sale systems) convinces them that they're wasting money.
Yes, it would be a good idea for them to spin off their actual products from their tort company, but not 'cause of their name.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
What in the hell are you talking about? "Linux barely supports most of that stuff" Linux fully supports *ALL* of that stuff. Has for a long time now. Keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about.
75% of all statistics are made up!
There's no market for this thing. If you've got technical issues that keep you from using Linux or BSD, you're probably also looking for a fancy processor, such as SPARC, not a "commodity processor". And running on x86 is the only serious advantage Unixware has over other "real" Unixes. So Unixware is semi-abandonware, like WordPerfect or 1-2-3. There will always be people who insist on such products, but not enough to sustain a serious busines. UnixWare's only remaining commercial value is as a basis for litigation.
Solaris for x86 is free for non-commercial single processor PC's - this was in the detail that /. reported.
The Unixware test here is on a multi(2) processor PC, aside from the fact that "Despite using a dual-processor system, SMP support is a licensed feature, so this installation only recognized one of the two processors."
Other posters have pointed out that Unixware is used heavily in commercial situations - notably retail. - your "free" Solaris is not for this.
Despite all of the above , I have to agree when you ask "Why bother with SCO".
Actually, most businesses tend to use IBM's 4690 POS network. The IBM OS runs a DOS-like CLI, with most applications being menu-based at the console. Touch screen terminals then interface with the server using the X-server protocol. A number of businesses use an application called InfoGenesis.
Since most cash registers you see are actually IBM terminals, businesses tend to buy their servers from IBM to get support for both the terminal AND the server.
Does anyone know of any organizations that actually use SCO Unix?
Which SCO Unix? There are basically two, UnixWare being the subject of the post. The other is left as an exercise for the reader.
I know of a injection molding facility that monitors about 50 multi-million dollar presses 24x7 with UnixWare. It runs a vertical app that does alerting (voice announcement, paging, calls) and gathers stats.
UnixWare was an early (first?) commercial implementation of UNIX on i386 hardware. A lot of geeks were pretty excited by it long ago. This mattered because it meant that you could deploy UNIX apps cheaply. So, a lot of vertical apps were ported and UnixWare became pretty widespread. It was a fairly plain-jane port of UNIX with credible-enough vendor support to make it possible to sell products based on it without having customers retch on your shoes. It was an easy port from other UNIX platforms, and this was probably it's main claim to fame. The other being almost-workable integration with Netware fileservers (after Novell acquired it.) I am amused when I remember how it seemed pretty obvious to me that whoever was responsible for that Novell integration piece was learning UNIX in the process.
Just because SCO owns UnixWare doesn't make UnixWare bad. It's largely obsolete now, but 10 years ago if you wanted to run UNIX on i386 hardware, UnixWare (or whatever it might have been called in late 1993) was a good choice. There are products running happily on UnixWare today, their users utterly unaware of the legal hoopla.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Those autoscripts may even detect a SCO product and refuse to compile. nmap's author does this deliberately and by now other projects may do so as well. Other projects will probably not merge fixes for SCO problems unless they are general enough to be a benefit for other platforms.
Some will say this tarnishes FOSS ideals. Helllllooooo! SCO wants to kill FOSS and unilateral disarmament is foolish. I'm in favor of any ethical way of isolating SCO and it's users. If the users find this inconvienient, they can pressure SCO to mend fences.
Installed UnixWare.
Common shells not installed automatically.
Tar has issues.
CDE barebones.
Software selection bad.
Has non GCC C compiler.
Does not have C++ compiler.
Cannot port many applications.
LKP pretty.
Did not really test security.
Don't bother asking for community help.
UnixWare fricken' expensive.
No plans for 64-bit.
In conclusion, UnixWare is dying.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The article was well-written and, I felt, fairly objective. My thanks to Mr. Bourke for keeping a level head when many are screaming bloody blue murder. For those who just want the meat, here it is:
These factors precluded the reviewer from really thinking of a single situation in which he could recommend UnixWare 7.1.3 as an installable option.
I've used sco unixware before.
and I can back this guy, it does suck. not out of bias.. it just lacks a lot of things, and has a very slow boot.
I installed slack on one of the computer repair machines at school (which had unixware on it) and ran another machine with unixware on it and had them boot side by side...
slackware won. and it was on the slower machine.
it's old, and maybe this is what all the crap is about. sco wants linux since they know they cant create anything better than 30 year old code that they never created. (in other words...)
so, they figure they can buy linux out, but what's this? linux cant be bought out. but wait, it looks like unix, they can try to pull an infringement case! but wait, no evidence! ok, so maybe court trials wont work that way, but litigation will scare people into submitting into their whims, but no, it makes people angry... and so on..
truly, I fear to see what's going on in darl's head. I wonder if he was that special needs child that got 4-square balls thrown at him by other children.
that or life in utah (or wherever he's from) warped him.
who knows.. I'm rambling now because I'm half awake.
Uh, ever hear of veritas cluster server and Oracle Real Application Server? I guess not