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An Objective Review of UnixWare 7.1.4
Roblimo writes "Yes, SCO is evil and all that, but in between lawsuits it still puts out a product called UnixWare. NewsForge decided to review the latest version -- 7.1.4 -- just like we would any other Unix-based operating system. To ensure impartiality, we hired respected freelancer Logan G. Harbaugh, who wrote: 'On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors.'"
And yes, I had lots of clients that used Xenix. And after a LOT of pain, they figured out that SunOS on a $15k sun was cheaper than Xenix on a $3000 386/25.
My friend still hates me for making him setup an early Unixware and it's NIS/YP "implementation" (rsh to master, copy files over, merge with local ones, done. That's like NIS, right mr customer?)
We tossed it for being grossly unsecure, even on a trusted LAN; slow and bad.
Oh, and the switch was set to Evil (but we didn't know it then).
Funniest thing in my mind is that the review keep saying things like "This means that most readily available open source applications need to be recompiled and the associated libraries need to be manually installed as well." as if it was a bad thing. The whole Gentoo community brags about this being a great strength.
I suppose you're referring to this:
'On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors.'
So this review is subjective because he pointed out how the expense compares to other operating systems? Uhhh.. ok.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
I think there really need to be another open source licence at this point.
I would love to see a GPL for everyone but SCO, or even a GPL that states that if you file a patent/copyright suit against GPL software that you lose your rights to use/modify it.
I know this would be a slippery slope and not in the true spirit of the GPL, but it really pisses me off to see SCO doing what they're doing to Linux and then tout there new OS which includes a whole bunch of Open Source software!!
Ok, nice and all.. lets be objective.
Sorry. As the systems/network engineer here, I get a fair amount of say in what goes and what doesn't, and even a bone-headed PHB (and I've got 2 out of three directors who fit that mould.. and I can say that here because I'm changing jobs anyway in a couple of months) can see that anything that makes as much noise as SCO is not a long term bet.
Short of it: Doesn't matter if Unixware is great or crap if its not a cast-iron guarantee that the company will be around in 3 years to support the platform.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I've used Xenix, Open Desktop, Open Server, and fairly recent versions of SCO UNIXware. I like Xenix the best of the lot.
The original UNIXware when Novell had it was pretty good, actually. Not like your typical commercial UNIX, because it didn't have nearly as much BSD influence as most of the survivors, but it did the System V thing as well as anything I've used. Don't expect it to be real happy in a BSD/Sun/Linux environment, but off by itself or surrounded by Windows or Netware boxes it was pretty solid. And, after all, that's what they sold it for.
The version I used after it had been in SCO's hands had an awful lot of Open Server in it, and it suffered from the transplant. The biggest problem was that the system just had too many different subsystems and components each with their own configuration interfaces all hidden behind their clumsy (but not much worse than other CDE-ish front ends I've used) GUI configuration tools. The result was that when things went wrong it was terribly difficult to diagnose.
This isn't something that you're likely to notice until you'd actually been using it in production a while, unless you had the bad (or is that good) luck to step on a crack in the initial install.
Back when it was Xenix, particularly the early versions, it was a lot more coherent and internally consistent. They really did start out with a pretty good system for the market they were selling into.
UnixWare comes with a C compiler
No C++ compiler? That means one will have to install g++ first to be able to re-compile many free software... a lot depends then on how well gcc supports SCO
While NeTraverse Merge 5.3.26c allows the UnixWare server to run Windows application all the way back to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I found that Windows NT applications did not run in three out of four cases...
Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it ? How does it compare with WINE?
Anyway, I guess the conclusion from the review is that UnixWare + LKP is not bad, but too expensive, though this extra cost can be justified in some narrow curcumstances?
Does not sound too optimistic for someone who claims to own UNIX, IMHO.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as the slasdot summary, does it?
No, but I'd like to hear from someone using it in production. I've been there, and unless they've pulled a lot of the stuff they added to the version of Unixware I last used back out again it's not nearly as good as it sounds.
Believe it or not, we are still nursing a few old SCO Openserver 5.0.x boxes along. Recently, I tried to purchase a SCO 5.0.8 because, I believe SCO is going to go belly up soon, and I wanted any last drivers they may have compiled into their O/S... I had to order the media and license separately. The SCO 5.0.8 media showed up, but the license has been backordered for about a month. It's really wierd that a piece of paper containing a license key could ever be on backorder. Maybe SCO fired their printer after all their NEW Linux license keys didn't sell.
I just wondered if anyone else has experience has tried to purchase any SCO product lately and experienced anything similar. Also, if anyone has any unused SCO 5.0.8 licenses they want to sell, please let me know. We are going are best to move off of SCO, but unfortunately some of the old applications just won't DIE easily.
Probably the only thing you get is compatibility with older versions of UnixWare. Thus, there will be few if any new converts, but there might be some upgrades. Overall, if I were running UnixWare, I'd be looking at upgrading to some form of Linux instead.
Unknown host pong.
and let's just put it this way, linux is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better, hell, I'd use windows over that piece of shit. it's slow,(takes 10 minutes to boot on a 200 mhz) it's not flexible, lack of apps, and if you dont have the administrative password, you cant retrieve it. it also uses a ton of outdated shit as well, the version I played with still had a standard unix shell... argh I cant even begin to point out how fucked up it is.
it's a waste, and SCO knows this. this is why they want linux to be theirs, they get some stock, they get a top quality system they never made, and they want it to be exclusive to them. unixware is simply a hack of SYSV unix, and sco openserver is much the same way.
Hi. We're SCO. We don't believe in the GPL, but we include a host of GPL'd applications in our version of UNIX that no one other than those already using it (and those are just trying to move away from it) want.
How to get fired: recommend software from a vendor who's source is closed and may not be around in the near future. No... I don't mean Microsoft. I mean SCO.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
**After looking at these points, why are we to assume that SCO is losing money because of Linux infringing on their IP? Isn't it more likely that SCO has just lost touch with the market, and has been passed up by better competitors?**
well in all fairness most of the competitors are linux based(in sco dreamworld they would have the only unix-like system on x86, where pesky things like hardware support and cost wouldnt matter).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's a huge pain in the ass. I've never seen a decent sized business (200+ people) without any software violations. It's just too hard to keep track of who owes what to whom and when it is going to expire. Not only is SCO's licensing expensive, it's pretty damn complicated too. Just look at the bottom of the article. The second half is all licensing details and I dare anyone to try and figure out their department's needs in less than an hour.
So yeah, it is expensive, but it also looks like a rat's nest.
Why I'm responding to a troll is beyond me, but I'll point out 2 reasons why even the trolls should RTFA.
According to SCO's own release and the review, a maximum of 8 processors are supported, not "scaling to hundreds of CPUs" as the parent states. Also, the review actually said more about SCO's products than I've ever gotten from SCO themselves, even back in '95 when I was looking for a UNIX for Intel (I chose Linux mainly because I couldn't find enough info on SCO, and the BSD documentation was something I wasn't able to make sense out of at the time). Admin GUIs are not something I expected from SCO, but apparently they're there. Their clustering technology is intriguing, and is another thing I didn't know they were even capable of.
If for no other reason than to "know your enemy" a good "technical" review of their product speaks more than any press on either sides of the lawsuits can for the company in the long run.
For those that must know, I run a number of servers, mostly Red hat ES 3.0 servers (including a 3 tier LVS cluster), with some Win 2k/2003 mixed in, and am writing this from a Powerbook running OS X. It's glad to know that is doesn't sound like SCO has made any jumps that would make me consider their product for work, so I need not fear the dark side.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
You are absolutely, positively wrong in your assumption about NewsForge. The truth of the matter is, SCO's PR would not send out a review copy to any journalist who had previously written bad things about SCO. So that's why the "new" reviewer.
1. I also liked Xenix better than the rest, though that's called "Damning with faint praise."
2. SCO's Unixware didn't do the "System V thing" as well as System V running on a '286 (Microport) or a '386 (Microport or AT&T), and it sure wasn't anywhere near as good as System V running on a 3B2.
3. MMDF sucks bigtime.
4. Porting things to UNIXware was a pain.
5. Device drivers for UNIXware were a bigger pain (driver for a TI34010 based closely coupled coprocessor imaging device). Worse even than AIX.
6. Agreed about early Xenix being OK. Except for the C compiler. Guess where that came from.
Unisys used to ship a 64-way server with a custom version of UnixWare installed.
I imagine that 8 CPUs is listed only because thats the highest level that commodity x86 parts support without getting into custom hardware/software.
If for no other reason than to "know your enemy" a good "technical" review of their product speaks more than any press on either sides of the lawsuits can for the company in the long run
This is a good point -- there's been tons of FUD spred against UnixWare from the Linux community since the lawsuit started. (Even ESR, the "Unix Historian", didn't know the difference between UnixWare and OpenServer.) Knowing 'objectively' that the product is marginally competant, but limited, is more damning than the flamage.
Allow me to toot my own horn for a sec. Gentoo portage on Solaris project It has slowed down a bit but now that OSX has portage I've been contacted by a gentoo developer that is interested in persuing this further.
"Win4Lin was basically the same thing OS/2 used to run Windows 3.1 applications."
..."
:-(
Not quite. IBM and Microsoft of course had access to the Windows source code, so they basically built a version of Windows that ran as an application under OS/2. At least, that was how my "blue spine" version of OS/2 Warp worked. I never used the "red spine" flavor, so that might do things differently.
Win4Lin, on the other hand, is a third-party VM. It boots and runs the "regular" Microsoft Windows, much like you do on a real machine.
"It actually ran a patched version Windows next to Linux."
Win4Lin does not really patch Windows. They do provide drivers for their virtual hardware, but that's not the same thing. They also offer an optional Winsock replacement for single-IP-address network access. I suppose you could call that a patch, but as I said, it is optional. I run Win4Lin using their virtual network card instead, which gets its own IP address on the LAN.
"It required kernel patches to Linux, too
Yes. One patch to the kernel network interface (for the above mentioned network trickery), another to the scheduler to make it friendly to their VM technology. The scheduler patch is quite small and, as I understand it, fairly unobtrusive. I know that some distributions (e.g., Mandrake) even ship their kernels pre-patched for Win4Lin.
"... it was doing some very low-level trickery to basically make Windows and Linux run in the same memory space."
Not really the same memory space. My understanding is limited, but as I understand it, Linux is already giving each process a virtual memory space to run in. The patches enable Netraverse to give their VM a task and memory segment under Linux.
"I forget if it was 3.1 or 9x, though. I'm thinking 9x, but could be wrong."
Win4Lin can run MS-DOS, or MS-Windows 95, 98, or ME. Netraverse is currently working to enable Windows 2000/XP as well. No time frame yet.
More info here: http://www.netraverse.com.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The company I work for supports Solaris, Unixware, Windows and AIX.
We will be dropping Unixware at the end of next month. We will be supporting Linux from that point on. Even our SCO account manager stopped calling about 12 months ago.
I personally quite liked Unixware. It was a strange OS, but it was another UNIX and something to play with.
The open edition of Xandros allows you to trial Netraverse's virtual machine.
:-) ) and it works fine.
I have been running W98 (with latest patches), I use MS IE 6.0 and Suns Java VM latest version (need all this for work, I would not do that of my own volition) in my computer at home with Xandros and it works quite well. I added Apple's application for multimedia (sorry, I forgot its name, the famous one
If you need to use Windows occasionally this is an excellent solution (I believe they only support W98 at the moment).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.