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Compaq's Tru64 may include KDE, GNOME, RPM

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-on-the-bandwagon dept.

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. "

1 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like a really good idea by Erik+Corry · · Score: 4
    I've been wondering for a while why the big Unix companies don't do something like this. Ship most of a Linux distribution, but with their own compilers and kernel (and whatever else they feel they are good at). It lets them ship a nicer set of tools and GUI than they do at the moment and at the same time they can concentrate on their strengths.

    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.