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Compaq's Tru64 may include KDE, GNOME, RPM
davie writes "
Jon Hall, leader of Compaq's Unix Group, said Compaq is porting its compiler suite from Tru64 to Linux, and will ship extended maths libraries under the open source General Public License. But Compaq is also considering adopting the software installation software Red Hat Package Manager, and the Gnome and KDE desktop environments in Tru64 Unix. The story is worth reading.
"
Which other alternative are you refering to, Debian's system (forget the name)? Regardless, it will be better than the whole 'setld' system in DU4.0.
--Britt
Hallelujah!
Now we'll see what Alpha is _really_ all about... under Linux!
:)
~AC
That phrase is now a cliche of American humor. Everyone from Leno to Letterman to Carlin mocks it.
Face the facts. The world is not some politically correct Kindergarten. Our world is made up of winners and losers. It is usually better to be on the side of the winners.
I don't see Mark McGwire or Michael Jordon abdicating their titles just to please some spazz who couldn't cut the mustard. Let the market decide and let the chips fall where they may.
Once GPL'd, I can't see any reason why the NetBSD team couldn't port for *BSD...
If Compaq follows through, this will be a landmark for Linux, *BSD and Alpha in general.
:)
~AC
REALLY HAS 2 Ls, LEARN HOW TO SPELL!
BTW, TO SEE THE BLACK BOX, SCROLL ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM AND ALL THE WAY TO THE RIGHT!
the math libraries will be open but the compiler will be a linux only binary.
No, but it doesn't really matter. The nice thing about Digital's compiler is code compiled with it is 2 times faster than code compiled with gcc. The Alpha has a very cool pipelining architecture that gcc just doesn't deal with. The compilers on x86 would give no real advantage over gcc and it's C++/Pascal/Fortran/etc. front ends.
A much catchier name would be "Gnu64 - formerly known as True64 - formerly known as Digital UNIX - formerly known as OSF/1", IMHO.
A vote for RMS is a vote for the future!
there was a garner group study of this, about thin servers. FreeBSD was shown to be faster than linux by about 20% in web serving. Take that w/ a grain of salt. I don't know the parameters and such, and I don't have a link, but that is the only real third party study I've heard of recently. There was one in a cmpnet pub, but that was like two years ago and probably isn't true anymore. And nobody can really put an and to it, because w/ each new release, the performance numbers will change.
Sure dpkg is better, we agree. But with rpm
being the defacto standard, dpkg has to become
10 times better than rpm in order to worth the trouble
switching to a new packaging system. Yes, it is sad that rpm is
widespread and not dpkg, but superiority alone
is not enough to change things, dpkg has
to become a ton better for things to
start rolling to dpkg's favor. That is the
idea behind standards, we standardize and stay put
until we can no long live without the alternatives.
Uh, seems pretty alive and well to me. Prove to me the vendor is bankrupt.
Dumbass.
No kidding. I ordered $130 dollars of Freebsd products before Christmas. My order was totally screwed up. I have had round after round of phone tag with them and still no resolution. To date I have one CD set dating back to last summer (from an order put in before Christmas). They screwed up my CDs order. They screwed up my handbook order. And the polo shirt I got from them is gross ugly. I think it is a defect but I don't have the energy to contest it. They still owe me another CD set and a handbook. Buyer beware.
I'm so surprised how people can manage to misspell his name. Particularly an article at a news site. Those guys should do a bit more research.
I have used FreeBSD for 2 years. Last week my buddy gave me a a beta copy of the new Caldera Linux. Well I had no intention of installing it. Period.
Fate had other plans. A tornado hit in my county and although my home was spared, the power was taken out. "What the hell" I said (yeah I really talk like that!) A couple days later I found out that my disk was corrupted so I reformatted and thought, lets try this caldera thingy before I do a restore.
My God it was a revelation. Linux really is smooth and slick to install. I don't care who you are, you've got to try this Caldera. It is pretty and easy and I now know what I've been missing.
I intend no offence to others. I am not an advocate but I do like a slick trophy and Linux has all the slick.
Boy virtually any GUI library than Motif is good for me!
Our toaster burnt out a couple of weeks ago, so I went out and bought a new one. Of course I was drawn to the one with the microprocessor. I don't know what it does -- it claims to help brown the bread evenly. I have been kidded mercilessly by my wife about it ever since.
ITS YOURE DUMBASS NOT YOUR
That should be "it's" and "you're". They're contractions: Words formed by gluing together two other words, or fragments of other words. It would be more easily expressed in BNF I think, but I hate BNF so fuck it -- and FUCK YOU, too!
Heh.
I'm really enjoying this thread, by the way. How did you manage to get them all moderated down to -1? I'm impressed. There's too much humorless crap on Slashdot these days. Sometimes it almost seems like the people with some imagination don't have too much time on their hands any more.
:)
please stop filling up Slashdot with this mindless drivel.
If you've ever seen anything on Slashdot other than mindless drivel, please post a link!
Anyhow, Slashdot can't "fill up".
Finally, I really enjoyed this thread. So there!
He meant 'lord', it was a joke
listen up brotha i dont need YOU to tell me what i meant i can tell myself what i meant i meant lord!
I'll tell you what he meant anytime i want!
That is put perfectly!
damn straight!
you got beef insomniac? BRING IT
JIMBO BOB'S COW GOES MOO!
Bring it fool!
MOO MOO MOO!!!
damn straight, indeed!
We gotta do this more often!
insomniac aint got shit.
I own insomniac!
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
DOES ANYONE KNOW THE WORDS TO OLD MACDONALD?
Then youll be quite happy that Corel has decided to make CorelDraw & Co KDE-applications!
http://www.debian.org/News/1999/19990421a
Have a nice weekend!
In addition to that already mentioned (debs have all the power of rpm and more), but they are dirt simple to make - basically a step away from making a tar.
The ability to auto-update is not strictly a deb format enpowerment, but Debian's APT is the ultimate package management tool bar none. It has made my life so much simpler. I love the ability to make an empty deb which has dependancies on other packages to easily install a standard set of software. I wish every unix vendor used debs and APT. Soon it won't matter since every unix box will run Debian!
The press usually gets it right that Linus Thorvald is a swede. :^)
Penguins, of course, are arctic creatures...
I have no doubt that WINE is useful to many folks, esp. in the shorter term, but wouldn't it be ideal if the apps were written for Linux to begin with?
Is there any project to make MS-Windows a vehicle for Linux apps? Should(n't) there be?
The more native apps - open, free or commercial - there are, the merrier.
A combination of Wine and Bochs would be a fun thing: All of the Wine code running natively, and the rest being emulated, so that you'd get native speeds for all Wine calls. That should speed up things quite a bit compared to running Windows under Bochs.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to make them aware of the issue with a polite e-mail...
So somebody obviously did their research before writing an article, while you might consider doing some research before posting.
Limited, yes. But it works.
old macdonald had a farm, eieio. and on that farm was insomniac and i fucked his mom all night long with an OOOH OOOH here and an OOOH OOOH there everywhere an OOOH OOOH.....
You can always have problems w/ mail order. Did you try again more recently? Don't base the conclusion on one experiences.
I almost never do the mail order bag, I don't like it. I got my FreeBSD 3.0 Official Cd set for the same price walnut creek sells it at San Diego Technical Books (who you can do a mail order from) because I can drive down there and pick up the CD.
There's already quite a bit of BSD stuff on the "typical" linux box, even without using lcc to compile it. So we would have to call it Linux/GNU/BSD/X.
Of course, don't forget Mozilla, The Hungry Programmers, The Blackdown Project, KDE, and every other project that produces software that is a part of Linux distributions. So it's Linux/GNU/BSD/X/Mozilla/Hungry/Blackdown/KDE.
See where this is going?
I don't think it compared FreeBSD 3.x though either. I think it was 2.2.x versus linux 2.0.
But I really don't think the issue will ever be resolved: both are constantly changed, updated and such, one may best the other one week, the next, the other wins.
Oh yeah, and more people doesn't necessarily mean better code. A lot of the new users are just cashing in on the hype: they do not contribute code. And what about Net|OpenBSD? Do those OSes totally suck (I mean, by the critical mass logic they should: they are both less popular than FreeBSD since they aren't really focused on end user issues like ease of install)? No, those OSes don't suck, they excel in what they are intended for.
I don't hate linux. I can't really have an opinion on it since I haven't really used it. But what I can have an opinion on is the crap I hear said about *BSD. BSD is good, linux (I've heard) is good, let's leave it at that, and learn from each other (though licensing issues make code other than compilers and other such tools coming from the GNU GPL world into the BSD world unlikely, a shame really: code sharing can't happen because of an ideological clash.)
. . . is that I was up most of the night reading The Design and Evolution of C++ (well worth a read if you're into C++, and/or annoyed by C++, and/or into language design), and I was starting to think I didn't have a life. Now I feel better
Except a lot of facts at that URL (not just about RPMs, either) are just plain *wrong*.
Oh yeah, and more people doesn't necessarily mean better code. A lot of the new users are just cashing in on the hype: they do not contribute code. And what about Net|OpenBSD? Do those OSes totally suck (I mean, by the critical mass logic they should: they are both less popular than FreeBSD since they aren't really focused on end user issues like ease of install)? No, those OSes don't suck, they excel in what they are intended for.
They may do what they're intended to do, but with more developers they could do that *and* more, which is what Linux / FreeBSD do in comparison. Look at OpenBSD. Sure, they're pretty good about auditing their source. On the other hand, functionality wise they're about three years behind NetBSD, and they're going to stay at least that far behind. They just don't have enough warm bodies to catch up.
BSD is good, linux (I've heard) is good, let's leave it at that, and learn from each other (though licensing issues make code other than compilers and other such tools coming from the GNU GPL world into the BSD world unlikely, a shame really: code sharing can't happen because of an ideological clash.)
Fix your idealogy and that won't be a problem. FWIW, I notice that FreeBSD has no qualms about using egcs, even though it's GPLed.
I've been hacking Linux for 6 years, and FreeBSD for about 4. I've seen what both can do. There really aren't noticeable speed differences between the two one way or the other. If anything, though, Linux 2.2's tcp stack is faster than BSD 3.1 / 4.0.
Could you please tell us why deb is supposedly better?
I've seen the claims again and again, but no solid arguments.
Of course you've just seen claims. These are Debian supporters you're talking about, willing to spread FUD at every turn.
Sorry.
Neo-nazi == Libertarian
In practice, there's no difference at all.
oh yeah the my boys dont fit into the traditional right-left political spectrum there are more than 2 choices and the stuff in between
Aren't they still just gonna be WINE ports, just in KDE.
If .deb is so great then why does deselect have to scan the whole cdrom to install a single fscking package.
dselect must be the ultimate newbie turn off. When your new you dont know what packages you want installed so you play around installing and deinstalling things, but it takes for ever with dselect.
This fact alone drove be away from debian bo when I tried it as a newbie. I guess I'm just lucky I didn't disregaurd linux altogether for debians short commings.
It's crem de LA crem, dumbass.
And don't call me pathetic or I'll kick your ass!
yeah asshole me too, get it right if youre gonna be a dick about it!
Dpkg's main advantage to RPM is its configuration functionality. RPMs - usually - do not configure themselves with other packages. I think that the architectures are similar, but dpkg's are often packages with configuration on installation, whereas RPM's are not.
Another difference is conflict resolution. RPMs conflict resolution is very elementy, while debs are specific.
One more thing: ugrading. Red Hat upgrades don't seem to go smooth unless it's a prestine copy. Dpkg's seem to upgrade cleanly, even with my heavily modified system.
Mainly, I just fine that Debian packages work out of the box, in comparison with RH5 and Debian 2.0 and 2.1.
After that NT-is-much-better-than-Linux FUD on M$' site, this is refreshing.
Aren't these the DEC Digital UNIX compilers? Porting them to Linux/Alpha isn't a large problem, as the assembly output is the same in general. Taking those compilers to Intel would get them nothing as they'd have to rewrite them from scratch.
--Britt
But deb is better, and some of us care more about technical merit than politics.
FX!32 was the end of Native application developement for AlphaNT. I've lost count of how many vendors I've tried to get to port their software over to the platform and then they give me "You can run it under FX can't you?". It was the worst thing that could have ever happened to the platform. It's a different arch and should be treated as such much like the powerpc/mac's. Do you see them whining about intel compatibility?
FreeBSD CAN NOT run Linux software on the Alpha. I asked Jordan Hubbard about this at Linux World Expo and he said no. He went on to say that he hoped compatibility with Digital Unix would come first. It looks like FreeBSD is locked out for the present.
Was it ever? I thought it was unsupported from the outset, like most of Alpha/Linux. It still works, albeit with some hacking, on RH6/Alpha.
Cool, then you'll have made BSD/Linux, and proved the point.
I think they meant "free software General Public License." Somebody needs to do some research before writing articles.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No.
X is a windowing system. It is not part of the OS. A Linux box can run perfectly fine without X. It cannot run perfectly fine without libc.
The Mozilla and KDE comment was even more ignorant, as those are obviously just applications.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe you should too. The full name of the GPL is the GNU General Public License. No "open source" or "free software" anywhere. So in other words: They likely meant "open source" as a qualifier to explain that the GPL is an open source licens (which is true).
I am well aware of the fact that "open source" was used as a qualifier. However, the proper term to use as a qualifier is "free software," as the GNU GPL is a Free Software license. It is not related to the Open Source Initiative, and the Free Software Foundation has never even sought OSI certification of the GNU GPL as an Open Source(tm) license.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You're missing the point. Tru64 will still be Tru64, a complete OS on its own. GNOME and KDE will merely be window managers (not part of the OS), and RPM isn't even a FSF project.
Linux, on the other hand, is not a complete OS on its own. You can boot Tru64 by itself. You cannot boot a kernel by itself.
The GNU OS will be an OS by itself as well. For the moment, it's missing a kernel, so you can use the Linux kernel as a replacement, making a GNU/Linux hybrid OS, or "GNU OS with the Linux kernel."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by d106ene5:
You forgot to mention one thing FreeBSD can do that linux (by definition) cannot: outperform linux any day of the week.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
Right here folks- the most pathetic thread by the most immature ACs on the net. As always, slashdot has the crem de crem.
Amen...
I've got Gnome and E running on RH6.0 and it is pretty and functional (and mostly stable). The
design of Gnome seems to follow the unix `tool' model and GTK looks a lot better to program than
Motif.
I sat, I stared, I popped a bottle of wine and drank to the well deserved death of CDE/Motif,
though few will mourn their passing. The sooner the unholy pair are purged from the earth by a
superior and free alternative the better. These tools have held the unix desktop back more than
any other single influence.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Looks like something/someone slaped this to the wrong thread.
Right now wine only works on x86. The Wine concept CAN theoretically run on Alphas for Alpha NT binaries, but that could be a lot of work patching stuff over. I don't know if anyone's going to do that until Wine stabilizes.
I have more interesting fish to fry.
I suppose someone could improve Bochs' performance. That might be a better option for non-x86 (except possibly Alphas, but see above).
According to this Deja News article em86 is no longer supported. This seems a pity.
Of course a version that worked with Wine to run x86/NT programs would be cool, but I rather doubt Compaq would want to release their FX!32 technology. They have worked on it for years, and it looks like they are better at it than anyone else. Intel needs something like this for McKinley (according to rumour it has no hardware support for x86 code), and perhaps even for Merced if the rumours of poor x86 performance are true.
I guess they could just rely on a combination of NIH and the GPL to stop Intel using it.
What is it about editors that gets everyone so emotional that they forget how to use the shift key?
Personally, I don't care so much about standards in an interactive app like an editor. It feels like vi, only much better, to an old vi fox like myself.
Not wanting to ruin RMS's decade, or anything
Should be possible to get it to work on the BSDs, then. They seem to have Intel executable support, so unless the compiler license specifically forbids it (why should it?) there should be no insurmountable problems.
Sure you could easily add a non-GNU shell. what compiler would you compile it with? Which C library would you compile it with (hint, all versions of libc for Linux are based on GNU libc). Which termcap would you link to?
You seem to think that Linus wrote the kernel, and then there just happened to be available all the free tools necesary to make a free OS. The reason why all the bits were just there as if by magic was that the GNU project had been adding them, filling in the gaps in the available free software until all there was missing (or rather late) was the kernel.
Do you think the GNU people wrote a C library because it was the most exciting free software project they could think of? I'm sure they would have had more fun writing the LISP-based windowing system they originally planned, but if they had done that we would have had two windowing systems (with X) and no C library. Ie we would not have had Linux distributions.
I can quite understand RMS's frustration that everyone thinks the entirety of the Linux system appeared out of nowhere as soon as Linus wrote the kernel. Probably changing the name isn't the way to raise awareness (gets too many people's backs up, and noone can be bothered with as clumsy a name as GNU/Linux) but I don't know what is.
For those old enough to remember the Yggdrasil distribution (my first) it was labelled Linux/GNU/X. Can't quite remember the order, though I still have the CD somewhere.
And of course what all the above means is that noone would want to call the combination of Tru64 and a lot of free stuff GNU/anything. To suggest otherwise (even as a joke) is to misunderstand totally the motivation behind the GNU/Linux name.
Could be, I am not familiar enough with the BSDs
There is *no* way to run Linux/Intel binaries under *BSD/Alpha
Sorry, I messed up. I wrote that the BSDs have Intel binary support. What I meant was that they have Linux support. Clearly the GEM compilers are Linux/Alpha applications, so, what is needed here is a way to run Linux/Alpha (not Linux/x86) binaries under BSD/Alpha.
It would save a lot of trouble for people who get new Unix boxes and have to spend a lot of time upgrading the tools to the stuff Linux has as standard. When you are used to Linux, 1000 little things about the big Unixes will irritate you. Like the useless versions of vi that everyone else ships, the bizzare packaging systems (none of them as good as rpm or dpkg) and the fact that that the up key just produces a set of escape codes on the screen in their shells. If it's so difficult to get right, why don't they just ship vim, rpm and bash?
Here at my University they already use rpm for all the commercial Unixes, and it seems to work fine.
What's the "open source General Public License?" A separate license, or corporate speak for "free software?"
now if i could only get my toaster to run linux...
It crashes and burns the toast under NT.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
I think this is a MAJOR win for Linux and will benefit all (maybe except M$). The neat part is that like SGI they will "Give back" source code adding to the snowball.
Help fight continental drift.
I can see it now:
:)
HOUSTON, TX -- Compaq officials rescended their idea of shipping with GNOME and RPM after receiving a threatening letter from the FSF which insisted that they rename their product to GNU/Tru64 to "give credit to the FSF project". Officials were unavailable for comment.
Hmm... maybe not
AFAIK, Intel binary support is available only in the *Intel* ports of *BSD. There is *no* way to run Linux/Intel binaries under *BSD/Alpha, and even if there was one (like an em86 port to *BSD), it would be slower than native binaries.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
nah, it's not linux 2.3.1 that will seal bsd's grave.. the BSD people are competent enough to pick up the enhancements too. I can see maybe one of the BSDs going away from lack of interest in a few years, because having 3 of htem is a bit too much for the number of people interested.. but otherwise my guess is that BSD development will continue indefinitely, just like that of Linux.
I think it's great that Compaq and SGI are starting to play nice with linux, it gives the rest of us a nice boost in support. But it shouldn't be world domination, just give everyone (not just geeks) a M$ alternative. OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX and half a dozen others can all do things linux cant, or do some things better. OpenBSD has über-security, NetBSD is rather portable and so forth. Linux can also do things better then all of them or some things they cant (like work the first time I install it unlike FreeBSd which didn't like my computer for whatever reason). What I hope happens is the companies that support linux add some of their features to linux, stuff they are good at. A journaling file system, better SMP support, ect.. I think that would lead to linux becoming a better all around OS, while still allowing for plenty of other operating systems. Heck, even MacOS and Windohs have their good sides. MacOS is obscenely easy for new users ad makes everything fluffy and cute while Windows drives more people to use unix.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I can't help but feel that Compaq is making a big mistake by adopting RPM for Tru64... of course, the irony here (unlike the VHS/Beta thing) is that both alternatives are equally cheap to license, so choosing the technically superior solution should be a no-brainer.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
Didn't the Gartner Group "thin server" study compare FreeBSD with Linux 2.0? Unfortunately, the Gartner Group study is no longer online (according to freebsd.org). I would bet Linux 2.2 would be (almost?) as fast as current FreeBSD.
FreeBSD may be faster now, but Linux is getting better faster. With millions more people using Linux, it has reached a critical mass FreeBSD never will. How long until Linux surpasses FreeBSD's networking performance?
cpeterso
Referring to Ghandi's saying, adopted by Linux fans -- "First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you... then you win" -- Hall said, "Everybody except Microsoft has got past the fighting stage."
Well, almost everybody but Microsoft, but it's still a nice quote.
And it only took about a year from the time Linux first came onto the Big Boys' radar screens.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I know that Compaq are porting their f90 and c++ compilers to Linux/Alpha, but are they planning to do the same for Linux/Intel?
I'm so sick of this,
GIVE ME SOME PROOF OR QUIT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the only thing BSD relly can do is make people produce lots of bad remarks on linux, are you jellous or what is the problem here????
I guess I'm over reacting but this is driving me insane, why can't sombody benchmark BSD and put an end to this...The only benchmarks I've seen were from BSDzine(very objective I guess,not) or something and showed that bsd was about 0.0* faster, big deal - NOT...
De lyckliga slavarna är frihetens bittraste fiender, legalisera!!!
Great but I hope they mean to make the libraries LGPL'd, otherwise you can't compile other than GPL with them or are they used for something completely different ?
De lyckliga slavarna är frihetens bittraste fiender, legalisera!!!
I hope they port to the *BSD alphas as well.
I'd hate to see this under BSD linux emulation.
First SGI then Compaq, this is a real stream of good news. Linux is now heading quickly to world domination. Now if Compaq and SGI could subsidize a project like Wine by devoting some developers to this project, that would be really great, and in less than one year, bye bye M$
It's great that Compaq has realised that Motif/CDE is a dead technology. Hopefully this will result in greater acceptance of either KDE or GNOME as the standard GUI for commercial Unices as well as Linux. It would be teriffic if big-name commercial *nix applications used Qt or GTK and offered KDE/GNOME integration, instead of the bloated, statically-linked Motif apps we generally have to put up with now. Hopefully other vendors will follow suit.
-- briggers Remove blinkers to email me.
see Wine/About ...is freely redistributable. (The licensing terms are similar to BSD.)"
:)
"Wine
>...Wine to run x86/NT programs would be cool, >but I rather doubt Compaq would want to release >their FX!32 technology.
If the licencse is BSD-like they should not have to release it.
We use GNU/SunOS.
I don't know, and please stop filling up Slashdot with this mindless drivel.
-- insomniac --