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HPs Linux Push
An anonymous reader wrote in to hook us up with a link
to a ZD article about HP and Linux.
Its a good follow up to the announcement that they are releasing
their own custom version of GDB.
The article talks about HP not wanting to be outdone by IBM,
and more interestingly, that they plan to embrace Open Source Development
and not just the Linux Operating System.
I thought it was particularly interesting that HP wants to support Linux partly to catch up to IBM.
Last year, when Linux was really just starting to get mainstream attention, a number of companies started to support Linux in some way because they thought it was interesting.
Now it looks like we're going to be seeing more and more people supporting Linux to stay competetive, because they're expected to support it. Soon enough, companies that aren't particularly interested in Linux (and perhaps don't even like it for some reason) will have to support it just because everyone else does. That's a great sign!
In particular, it makes me think that we can make the same push with software freedom over the next few years. If enough companies (and especially big names like HP) become interested in free software, soon their competitors will have no choice!
As another person said, it depends on what you do.
But IMO when you compare an OS with another on a generic level you should ignore any special "features" they might come with, like LVM or journalled file systems. That's like an application anyway. It's like blindly saying one car is better than another because it has no-flat tyres or something.
As far as Unix is concerned there are IMO a couple of real losers out there: 1: Ultrix. 2: HP-UX. AIX is full of strange bugs and annoyances, but it's much more mainstream to work with (and definitely getting even more mainstream), but do an "ls" in AIX 4.1 or 4.2, then ask yourself "now where the h*** did my files go??" Repeat the command and suddenly they're back. That's something you can get used to, it's worse when sockets stop working on the SP/2 switch for no apparent reason and you have to reboot. Then there are unkillable processes, memory leaks (a workstation here with 64MB RAM has to be rebooted every two weeks because it eats all the memory. And it's doing nothing.. we don't use it for anything. It's *idle* all the time. Compare that to my heavy-duty Linux box with uptimes over a year and not a byte leaked (X11 up all the time too).
But I would still say AIX is better than HP-UX or Ultrix. Solaris is probably ok but I just don't enjoy working with it. IRIX is good. Linux is good. SCO pre-Unixware was pretty bad to work with, but not necessarily buggy though. I don't know about Unixware. I have no personal experience with the *BSDs but from what I hear they are good too. Oh, and DEC Unix is ok from what I hear, but again I have no personal experience with it.
We use SGI hardware, Sun hardware, IBM hardware, and we used to have HP hardware. For the three first ones we can live with the vendor OS (IRIX is particularly ok IMO), but no way we could go with HP-UX. If Linux ran on HP two or three years ago (no technical reason it couldn't have) we would still have the HP boxes in-house. We can survive with AIX on IBM workstations, but it's a lot of pain and you can stand the pain only so long.
- TA
i guess my concept of linux was completely off base when i thought that it was an OS. Thanks ZDNet for clearing it up that it is actually a LANGUAGE! Imagine how embarrasing THAT would have been! I could see myself going to a job interview, the interviewer asks me "Do you program in the linux language?" and me laughing in their face! HA! Oh, my side hurts from laughing.. But now that wont happen!
Ryan
I think im gonna crawl back in my hole now.
Fine. Just call the guy as a witness the next time Microsoft tries to pull the "We're so afraid of Linux" stunt.
HP only provide binaries for Red Hat with
paths hard-wired
*Bleah* Red Hat might be fine for newbies,
but...
Let's not get too pumped up about HP until
they take a more distro-neutral stance.
IMHO the *nixes that score higher then linux :)
is IRIX and Solaris
Yawn. Go run HURD. When you can manage to use slashdot from HURD, then come on back.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with the Linux kernel or that people shouldn't use it. However, they should use the proper terminology. Nobody says "I run the Win32 Operating System," so neither should theys ay "I run the Linux Operating System." The Linux kernel is just the final component of the GNU OS, an Operating System years in the making.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That statement from HP that Linux was not up to the
quality of HP-UX is so crazy that I don't know if
I should cry or laugh.. we bought a bunch of HP
work stations because they looked cheap at first sight.
In the end we threw them all out and good riddance.
What a crappy OS! Full of bugs, and all the HP-VUE
X applications were statically linked so we had to buy
a lot of extra RAM to make the boxes usable. That killed
the price advantage.. Ok it may be that HP-UX can
run 8-CPU better, but other than that HP-UX is in the league of Ultrix: Total crap.
If ur willing we can start an anti-Open Source campaign and nip this problem in the butt. We can make Bruce and RMS our leaders!
HP provides precious little support for their non-postscript printers even for their own operating system. I guess they just assume that if you're using big HP iron then you'll fork over the $1500+ for one of HP's postscript printers. If you want to print to an HP PCL printer from an HP workstation running HP-UX you have to use Ghostscript - pretty amusing.
Ummm, Linux is better than HP-UX if you don't need online resizeable disk partitions, a journaling file system with online resizing, or access to character disk devices (required for any kind of serious RDBMS activity). Linux is really very good, and HP-UX is really pretty bad, but there are some features of HP-UX that Linux doesn't and won't have for some time.
/stand/vmunix /stand/vmunix
That being said, HP-UX is probably doomed as an OS thanks to bloat that would put Microsoft to shame:
# uname -smr; ls -l
HP-UX B.10.20 9000/800
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 9876156 Jan 12 17:32
I hear that HP-UX 11's kernel can be twice as large.
The guy was clearly afraid of what microsoft would do to HP is he had said anything that might suggest that Linux even has a chance of replacing NT ...
We must have had really different experiences. I've worked a lot with SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX and Linux at work, and HP-UX is by far the worst of the lot.
I'm glad to see HP get on the bandwagon, though. They've been pushing NT in all sorts of inappropriate places, and that's hurt their credibility in the last 2 places I've been. Maybe they'll get out of bed with MS, get rid of HP's CEO Lew Platt before he kills the company, and return to growth and profitability.
To me, open source means any software where the source code is generally available and distributed with the software. It seems fairly simple.
All the bickering over the different types of licenses and the "purity" of various types of open source licensing schemes to me seems counter-productive. There may be times where one type of license is more appropriate than another depending on the type of software and the intent of the developers.
In my opinion, open source is a development model and the more this model is embraced by companies like HP the better. Companies, as well as individuals, have alot of recources which if turned outward through the open source development model can greatly advance the cause of open standard systems like Linux.
AFAIR the HP-UX kernel image includes debug symbols. Try "size" to get the real memory requirements ...
"Hopefully will get large companies to recognize Debian in the future"
keep hoping, man, but until then you get what they want you to get
You liar. I am Anonymous Coward. Do not confuse the lad.
That's what I meant.. and that's how SGIs come these days. Ok it's /usr/people not /home, but other than that all those directories are in one big partition (and SGI *does* have a growable file system just like IBM). And yeah, it works *much* better than it used to do in the past, when they came with the tiny root partition which always ran full at the most inconvenient time. I remember Sun hell back in the past when we only had Sun boxes and they all had tiny root partitions. The reasoning was that it was "less chance of destroying something important if you don't keep your files (eggs) in the same partition (basket)", but that's in my opinion bogus. The other argument I hear is that with /usr/people on the same partition as / then a user can fill up the "root" disk and you have a DoS attack when root can't even log in to fix it.. wrong again, only root can fill up the last few percents of the disk (it's like that in Linux too). /tmp (swap filesystem), so it's separate from the rest. That's fine. And if I set up a CVS server on a (non-Solaris) box, then I would also make /tmp a separate filesystem, a really big super-fast one, because CVS servers first copy everything into /tmp before sending it over the net to client. But for ordinary workstations and standard servers I say "make the disk one big partition and put / and /usr and /tmp and even /home on it and be done with it". No need to juggle the space between file systems, with one partition you have the ultimate dynamic system.. no more "I need 200 MB for this temporary file, and I have 150 MB free on / and 170 MB free on /usr but I can't find 200 MB in one place". Make another partition/filesystem when you get another disk, heck, add the disks together with md or another logical volume manager and make one even bigger filesystem of those disks :-)
Now, there are some exceptions of course. Solaris uses a special file system type for
TA
I'm starting to be confused. At first, people were complaining that no one recognized Linux as a commercially viable product. Then, came a distribution that made it easy for the average Joe Sixpack (not to mention higher management) to implement Linux at home and/or workplace. That distribution which had made it so easy was RedHat. Now people are complaining that everyone relates to RedHat and that RedHat is taking too much spotlight. For F%$(#'s sake. Start figuring out what you want. A nice OS with some credibility or 25 different distro ?
SiLi
I must have missed that information in the article... and I read it twice (but I've been up since 3:30 AM).
Wouldn't distributing binaries only violate the GPL?
HP is just an older version of the microsoftian
Borg strain. I've never worked with wierder
stuff than what HP produces. HP-UX is really
wierd, although I'm no fan of Solaris either.
I just hope that the GPL is really air-tight.
My fear is that HP will take the "embrace and
obscure" route with open source.
The printer manual also has driver alternatives you can use. I use the CDJ550 driver for my CDJ670.
---
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Well I don't know about AIX, but I do know that, on HP's (well Veritas' on HP-UX, actually) implementation of LVM, you have lvreduce and vgreduce.
Perhaps this is the point you were making?
I don't not think he said what what he did because he was "afraid of microsoft".
It could be that he honestly believes what he said. But oh no It's got to be part of the Great Conspiracy. All Articles written with Microsoft tools automatically inserts a paragraph that it won't replace NT. Bill Gates is the Devil *foaming from mouth*
Remember, sometimes a banana is just a banana.
Of course Red Hat is going to be the first choice for a US company. Red Hat has significant name recognition and they've been scrambling to get 24x7 support in place (that's what they are doing with the money from Intel and Netscape). The article also pointed out that HP was going to use Linux distributors for there support. About the only other choice today in the US for 24x7 is Caldera. Finally, HP said that their agreement with Red Hat is not exclusive. Until LinuxCare and similar multi-distribution support centers get ramped up, companies are going to go with the big distributions in their region (Red Hat in the US, SuSE in Europe and Pacific High Tech in Asia). Hopefully will get large companies to recognize Debian in the future, right now there isn't an accepted 24x7 solution for it.
Sheesh, mention Red Hat and people freak out...
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Next time you guys invest alot of money in HP hardware and decide to throw it out, let me know which dumpster you use. My email address is zachary@acm.org.
Posted by Buffy the Overflow Slayer:
If they really want to support Linux, one of the
best things they could do is write Linux drivers
for their "windows" printers.
-Buffy
Is it me or does that arguement not make sense. In my work environment, there are Windows for Workgroups 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. All of these are similar, but I do know that there are certainly compatibility issues.
At least with the open development in Linux, you can fix the changes yourself to make everything work the way you want to. Plus, everything is based on unix, so the administration stays the same. With all these differences in Windows versions, that's not necessarily true.
I believe the quote above is misleading and completely ignores the point of open source.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Companies desire gratis labor from the community, without guarantees
that future code will remain free. Their websites ask our
community for patches and bug reports, all in the name of "Open Source".
Open Source is good for their prosperity, but is not good mine.
Before Open Source, the lines were drawn clear. If the program was GPL, I
would promptly file a bug report, or even spend time and aim for
a fix. Most of the bugs were not critical for me, and yet, I did spend
many weekends as an expression of thanks for all that GPL has provided for me.
Open Source is not the same as GPL.
Have I missed out on something, or am I not the only one who has never heard of these guys before? Fill me in...
IAAL,BIANLY
Die! Banana, die!
Uh oh...
No, this isn't Linux paranoia. Anyone who has been following HP's bittersweet romance with the Wintel world can identify this as the standard behavior of any exec from HP's Unix side when asked about Microsoft: the eyes glaze over, the Manchurian Candidate programming kicks in, the exec toes the line.
This behavior can be seen as far back as two years ago, when any Server Group or Workstation Group exec was asked about HP-UX vs. NT, or PA-RISC vs. Merced. It's not "fear of Microsoft", it's fear of HP's NT division, and fear of the repercussions of admitting publicly what I'm sure they all know privately: HP partnered too closely with Microsoft and Intel for its own good.
From what I understand these "Windows" printers hook into some Win95 code... It is up to M$ to release the specs.
.
I run a small cluster of HP-UX boxen and I have to say I much prefer Linux. The only things I like about HP-UX are LVM and the bundled Veritas file system. I would not be surprised at all to see Linux outperform HP-UX on 32-bit PA-RISC very soon, and on 64-bit PA-RISC not long thereafter.
I mean, what can you say about an operating system with a 10 to 20 megabyte monolithic kernel? I think HP's pushing Linux not just as a way to keep up with IBM, but as a way to keep PA-RISC viable.
I'll take AIX any day. The admin tools make it easy to look after: smitty, lvm, jfs, fixdist, 64bit and a command line call to do just about everything. I consider it the "modern" unix.
That said. Once Linux gets lvm and jfs then its going to soar to the top.
HP-UX is just too buggy and off in its own world. Hard to look after, but lvm/jfs are nice.
Solaris, yuk. Tools haven't changed in 20 years. I consider it the "old" unix. Last to become 64bit.
SGI, cute, but buggy and wacky. Hard to look after.
Ultrix, worked fine 10 years ago, but come on give it a break it hasn't been sold for a long time.
Tru64. Runs solid, but again "old" unix. 64bit though.
"Next time you guys invest alot of money in HP hardware and decide to
throw it out, let me know which dumpster you use. My email address is
zachary@acm.org."
Naah, next time we'll run Linux on them instead and get some mileage out of the hardware.
IMO HP should have dumped HP-UX a long time ago and gone Linux instead. Then we would probably still use HP around here.
-TA
I have used Linux for nearly seven years, and AIX for only two, but /tmp sillyness. Never regretted that.) In this way you avoid the decisions about how much to give to this filesystem and how much to give to that filesystem.
"If Linux has reached a level where it is relatively equal to AIX in
relaibilty and functionality[...]"
all those two years it has never been a question of Linux reaching the reliability level of AIX.. Linux is way more reliable. It's another division completely. About functionality, the only thing I can think of is the growable file system in AIX, and as I've said before that's really an external feature not a characteristic of the operating system. I grow those JFS filesystems all the time, but face it people, as long as it isn't possible to *reduce* filesystems it's simply a glorified way of putting off the decision about how big you want to make the filesystem in the first place. An AIX box comes preinstalled with a whole bunch of tiny tiny filesystems (/tmp,/usr,/var,/home,/man,/ and so on), and the first thing you have to do is to increase them before they hit you straight in the face. It *always* fails because IBM won't sell a useless config..? Then you can start pointing out to people that IBM systems come with a completely useless setup (not only the partitions, everything else is crazy too..
process limits, login limits, swap space, basically *everything* is preconfigured to give you and your users a headache).
And in the end it's so much better to just make a big partition and be done with it (SGI come preconfigured this way now, and that's how I do my Linux setups too. No separate
But come back when you can *reduce* the filesystems.. then it may be more of an advantage.
TA
I've read people say that Linux is clearly better than SCO, and now that Linux is better than HP.
How does Linux stack up against AIX?
Could it be said that the only 2 *nix which are clearly better than Linux are DEC and Solaris?
The page shows an anti-Apple bias. The entry for MacOS should be
MacOS sucks attractively
Who is this "Puffin Group"? How do we contact them. I would like to be involved in this port.
HP is helping with the open source project, it isn't Red Hat related. Have a look at The PARISC Linux WWW page.
A translation of what he said, into English:
"Well officially I'm not allowed to say that Linux wipes the floor with NT,
so instead I'll make some random noises in the hope that they'll placate the Beast of Redmond."
http://www.nytimes.com/techweb/TW_Hewlett_Packard_ Leaps_On_Linux_Bandwagon.html
"OS/400 sucks, but you don't have access to QSYSLIB/WRKSUKSTS to find out how much."
--BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! ROTFL!
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
From my experience in HP's ability to be able to develop "cutting edge" software is non-existant. In a certain market (that IBM is market leader), HP has 4 attempts that I know of to make a decent product in the last 3 years. All of them either failed or never got to market.
HP isn't going to make or break the Open Source part of the industry the way it operates today.
HP is still not a software vendor unless the product is mature and in Maintence mode.
They have a difficult time being "visionaries" instead of being totally driven by "popular customer requests".
Even through several restructurings of their software side, I personally have never seen the situation improve.
Hardware wise, they "have their ducks in a row". They do make nice printers.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with the Linux kernel or that people shouldn't use it. However, they should use the proper terminology. Nobody says "I run the Win32 Operating System," so neither should theys ay "I run the Linux Operating System." The Linux kernel is just the final component of the GNU OS, an Operating System years in the making.
Why don't you do something constructive like rent a tractor to pull that telephone pole out of your but?
Smitty I use, but mostly in order to get something into the smit.script and smit.log files so I can see what commands it *actually* runs (the docs are not too good).. then I use 'dsh' (parallel rsh to many machines) to execute the whole string of commands (mkdirs and whatever) on 16 SP/2 nodes at the same time with one command.
SGI is 64 bits too, and one of the first ones. AIX wasn't 64 bit before 4.3, and Linux was 64 bit on DEC Alpha from day 2 (on day 1 there was a 32 bit port done by DEC, Linus did the 64 bit port). I completely disagree with what you say about SGI though, it's totally the opposite of my experience. Other than that you summed it up nicely I think.
TA
Well, I'd love to run Linux on an HP box, but HP-UX is some nice stuff
You do realize that there are other distributions?
...
You are showing the normal US citizen ignorance. Here in Europe, nobody talks about RedHat. They talk about Linux (and sometimes about GNU/Linux).
And why should not there be 25 different distributions? To name just a few:
SuSE, DLD, Debian, Slackware, RedHat, Caldera, Linux Pro, Turbolinux
There exists a Linux Distribution HOWTO.... guess what it is for.
Ghostscript doesnt do anything for "windows only" printers like the 71x, 72x, and 8xx series because they use a special language called PPA as opposed to the traditional language PCL that ghostscript can do. The printers do not, however, have any special reliance on Windows "hooks" as one poast put it. HP just made the (BAD) decision to make the protocol they use for these printers proprietary and they refuse to release specs without an NDA. There is, in fact, a driver for these printers written by a third party but it is buggy and only supports black and white. I totally agree that if HP is serious about open source they should (at least) help this guy with the driver development (or maybe even write their own). Maybe we should start a petition or something.
coming from a large industry player like HP. Slowly but surely more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon....
I hope they -do- port this to linux...and I also hope they don't completely screw it up like they did when they ported it to windows.
Then again...I suppose porting ANY unix app to windows involves totally screwing it up....
*bah*...'extend and embrace,' my arse....
Hmmm. I have found it sometimes buggy, I admined serveral HP's and the joke was that "a letter was left out of the name".
Umm, what exactly is that? As far as I know, no Operating System exists with a name of "Linux." There's a kernel with such a name, but it's not any more of an Operating System than Mach or HURD are. Perhaps you're confusing it with the GNU Operating System, commonly used in conjunction with the Linux kernel (since the real GNU kernel, HURD, is not yet finished, most people replace that portion of the GNU OS with the Linux kernel).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have had to explain to the reseller I just bought five HP Vectra P-II-450 systems from all about Linux, and that I didn't want Windows 98, NT, or anything else at all on them. The irritating this was that they wouldn't ship the PC's to me at the time, because they were out of stock of Windows 98 CD's. Trying to explain that I didn't want a windows 98 CD led to some heated phone calls. I normally build my own systems, but I needed a brand name manufacturer so that they can be supported at their eventual destination without me having to go all the way over there (Hong kong) from the UK just to plug some board or other back in.... I might as well try and herd cats.
Now my reseller is telling me that the hardware isn't supported without the preinstalled software... Aaaarrgghh!
Shameless company website plug
- Linux is being deployed as "infrastructure servers"
- So Linux will be installed on some systems instead of NT...
- ... but not on all.
- Linux will is good for single applications on a dedicated machine. Like for example in retail.
Maybe it's just my poor understandning of English grammatics (or marketspeech ?), but it looks to me as he's just "covering all bases".I'll leave this discussion but let me just say once more that I still don't think the statement is caused by Microsoftfear (TM) or some companywide policy not to offend Microsoft.
I think the sense of Paranoid tendencies amongst Linuxusers can be something that works against Linux chances at being considered as a "serious" alternative.
I like Linux & Unix in general but I have learned not to "preach" to customers and friends.
Is this the Open Source certification abuse Bruce Perens was talking about? According to Bruce Perens we can now never be sure what Open Source means. Thanks for clearing that up, Bruce Perens.