Tru64 UNIX for Hobbyists: $99

Anonymous Coward writes "For those of you out there with Alpha hardware, it seems that Compaq is now offering its Tru64 UNIX to 'technology enthusiasts' for a mere $99." A heavily restricted (VERY non-GPL) license is attached to the deal, but it looks like it would be a nice combination toy and "teach yourself commercial UNIX at home" tool.

Comments

slashdot users

[Anonymous Coward]

The responses to this story give a very interesting view of the experience level of most Slashdot users. I think it would make quite an insightful poll to find out how many Slashdot readers have actually ever used a real (i.e. not Linux or pseudoBSD) Unix. With responses like "if you get this, can you run your fav linux games?", "You can get Linux or FreeBSD for nothing, and you get to *keep* your soul.", "Why would anyone pay $99 for a closed-source, unsupported, singl-architecture UNIX?", it really makes me wonder how many of these people had even HEARD of Unix 5 years ago. I especially love that "why would anyone pay $99" arguement... a Unix license used to run in the thousands! I find it so amusing that when Compaq does what is basically a *major favor* for the hobbyist computer user, they get blasted for "not being all cool and open sourced!" by people who more than likely only use their "rad bawXen" for bitchX and don't even know what C code looks like. Honestly, you people have no idea how good you have it nowadays.

Re:slashdot users

[Sun Tzu]

So true. Around 1990 I bought a copy of Esix Unix SVR3.2 for about $600. The big appeal of Esix was it included X and a C compiler and cost about half most other PC Unices. I wound up spending another $300 on the manuals. For less than a grand I had Unix, C, X, and a full set of manuals! I was in heaven.

I ran that Unix until 1995 when I picked up a copy of Slackware (with book, CD, and 1.2.8 kernel for $40) in a local bookstore. About 6 months later I retired Esix for good.

Now, shipping from Cheapbytes costs more than a CD of any of several much more modern distributions. Yep, we got it good alright. ;)

Re:slashdot users

[osu-neko]

With responses like "if you get this, can you run your fav linux games?", "You can get Linux or FreeBSD for nothing, and you get to *keep* your soul.", "Why would anyone pay $99 for a closed-source, unsupported, singl-architecture UNIX?", it really makes me wonder how many of these people had even HEARD of Unix 5 years ago. I especially love that "why would anyone pay $99" arguement... a Unix license used to run in the thousands!

Irrelevant. The cheapest available electronic calculators were over a hundred dollars when I first got one. But nowadays, people give away better ones for free with your paid subscription to (whatever). What does the fact that Unix licenses used to run in the thousands have to do with the fact that by today's standards this is not a good deal. The fact that I was running a commercial Unix (SunOS primarily) over five years ago doesn't mean I'm too senile to have noticed the Unix world has changed a lot in the last five years.

I find it so amusing that when Compaq does what is basically a *major favor* for the hobbyist computer user, they get blasted for "not being all cool and open sourced!"

I would hardly call $99 for an OS with poor third-party hardware support and an excessively restrictive license a "major favor". If you have a use for it, fine, but it's a rip off for most.

by people who more than likely only use their "rad bawXen" for bitchX and don't even know what C code looks like. Honestly, you people have no idea how good you have it nowadays.

I know what C code looks like. Many styles, in fact. I was fluent in it before ANSI got their hands on it. But again, this is utterly irrelevant. Why on earth would my C programming experience have any bearing on my ability to note that, for my purposes, this is not a good deal?

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Re:slashdot users

[bmetzler]

Why on earth would my C programming experience have any bearing on my ability to note that, for my purposes, this is not a good deal?

The original post had nothing to do with whether this was a good deal or not. The poster was refering to the fact that it appeared that the other posters were clueless about Unix and what it really was marketed for.

Tru64 and Linux have different marketable areas. I don't think that anyone using Linux would be considering Tru64. Statements like, "Can I play games on this?", as well as the ones mentioned in the first post prove this.

No, Tru64 isn't for people who use Linux because they are rE411y r4d d00dz. For them, it isn't a "good deal". But then Compaq isn't focusing this offer on them anyways.

-Brent
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Combine with Linux?

[X]

Hey, as I recall, Linux had support for running Tru64 binaries IFF you have a copy (and for those of us who don't want to be sued, a license) of the Tru64 runtime libraries.

If so, does this license give you access to the runtime libraries? This could be a big win, in particular since the Tru64 compilers and JVM's are much better than Linux's.

Alpha owners, don't run out and order just yet...

[otis wildflower]

You _do_ have a motherboard that supports T64, right? The cheaper cloner motherboards (those that were meant for budget NT/Linux systems) don't have enough NVRAM to support a T64 installation. I'm not an Alpha nerd but definitely check into whether your Alpha board (or the board you want) actually supports T64.
Your Working Boy,

Re:Alpha Hardware

[Mac_Daddy]

I've bought QUITE a few Alphas off of EBay. Just to a (DEC,Alpha) search on Computers -> Hardware. You can (could?) get a AlphaStation complete system for 300+, usually a EV4 (21064) 233 mhz machine. I have also picked up a PC164SX motherboard/Cpu combo (533mhz EV5 21164PC cpu) that takes DIMMS and can do either Tru64 or NT.

The main problem with Tru64 is that it supports VERY limited hardware. You have to have mostly Compaq/Digital hardware. An Adaptec SCSI card won't work - there aren't any drivers for it. A Matrox video card won't work - no drivers. A 3Com NIC on Tru64 won't work - no drivers. And Tru64 is notorious for not liking non-Digital hard drives and CD-ROMs. And this is all from experience, as I am currently a Tru64 administrator. But don't let this discourage you, as on my Tru64 box (the PC164SX box), I have an IDE CD-ROM and Quantum IDE hard drive on the box. Although I did order a 128 meg DIMM from Viking that was for this particular board. And BEay does have the individual parts and pieces available so you can get a DE500 NIC or perhaps a Digital/Compaq Qlogic ISP SCSI card. Of course, you can also order them from Compaq.

But there are some manufacturers that offer Tru64 hardware and drivers. For example, check out http://www.intraserver.com. They do SCSI cards for Intel, Sparc, and Alpha. They have drivers for Tru64, NT, OpenVMS(!) and Linux (and Solaris). So, of there's one, there may be another...

This is hilarious

[overshoot]

The Company actually had a couple of Alpha machines that we were going to use for SPICE boxes, but DEC wanted several thousand $$$ per for a single-user license. Wasn't worth it. They sat around for a while and we loaded Alpha Linux on them and that was kool, but no executables for anything we really needed to do.

So, a couple of weeks ago, they were officially scrapped. I hauled them home hoping to load them with a current Linux distro (still no Alpha RH6.1, though -- wonder why?) So while getting around to it along comes Compaq with a rush of brains to the head and guess what?

ROTFLMAO!

Don't give me that...

[roystgnr]

Yeah, yeah, I know: you're not a real old school hacker unless you were working on Unix before Unix bacame popular. Good for you.

I've only used Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux (and only written code for the last two), but frankly I'd much rather be using Linux than any of the above.

I've heard Unix admins gripe about non-standard Linux-isms, but is a BSD/SysV syntax mix really that much of a problem compared to compilers that default to K&R instead of ANSI C, and system calls that were created solely to make your Unix source code incompatible and lock in software developers?

And as for the quality of said systems... well, Solaris is pretty sweet, but AIX and HP-UX are dead as soon as someone finds a hole deep enough to bury the remains. I remember telling people how aggravating it was that you couldn't upgrade a shared library or program in Windows while it was in use... only to discover that HP-UX 10.20 had the same limitation, not to mention further bass-ackwards problems with dynamic linking.

And don't get me started on CDE. The idea that multiple massive software vendors collaborated to produce the best desktop environment they could, and came up with *CDE* anyway, boggles the mind.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things that commercial Unices have (64-way SMP, high availability clustering, more optimized compilers, etc.) that Linux has yet to catch up to. But just because they're too expensive for the unwashed masses doesn't mean they're always worth it.

Re:Tell me why.

[LinuxParanoid]

If you actually want the answer to "what features does it have," go download the free 75+ page paper examining commercial UNIX features from D.H. Brown Associates. Click on "1998 report (download PDF)." It's a little old, but quite thorough if you want to know more about Tru64 (and other $$$ UNIX) features. I think they have another white paper focusing just on the improvements in the newer Tru64 5.0 release somewhere on Compaq's website. Search, search, search... ok, here's more on Tru64 v5.0 features from them.

--LP

Re:mmm, alpher

[LinuxParanoid]

The best fair metric for chip performance seems to remain SPECint95 and SPECfp95 (www.specbench.org).

By that metric, the fastest recorded RISC and CISC speeds (1 per architecture) are the following:

700 MHz 21264A Compaq AlphaServer GS60E:
39.1 SPECint95 / 68.10 SPECfp95 (or w/ minimum optimizations, 34.7 SPECint_base95 / 54.5 SPECfp_base95)

733 MHz Pentium III (i840) Intel:
35.6 SPECint95 / 30.4 SPECfp95 (no _base figures available, figures from Intel, not yet on SPEC website)

440 MHz PA-8500 HP N4000:
34.0 SPECint95 / 51.4 SPECfp95 (30.8 int_base / 48.7 fp_base)

450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Sun Ultra 60 Model 1450:
19.7 SPECint95 / 27.0 SPECfp95 (16.2 int_base / 23.90 fp_base)

300 MHz MIPS R12000 Origin 2000 2-way:
18.4 SPECint95 / 34.4 SPECfp95 (18.1 int_base / 30.1 fp_base)

340 MHz PowerPC RS64-II IBM H70:
16.0 SPECint95 / 21.2 SPECfp95 (13.7 int_base / 20.2 fp_base)

Thus the answer to your question is "Yes, Alpha remains the fastest", with the important caveat that the 10% performance advantage over Intel comes at a significantly higher price. All other RISCs are slower than the fastest Intel systems, at least in terms of uniprocessor integer performance, the best single predictor for most CPU-limited applications.

Note that Apple G4 performance, and performance of IBM's latest S80 (450 MHz Power RS-III) aren't discussed by their respective vendors. If you extrapolated the G4 performance from the mildly similar 340 MHz Power RS-II, performance of a 500 MHz part would be around 23.53 SPECint with SPECfp at 31.8. IBM's Power PC 604e parts have slightly lower integer performance and much lower floating point performance at the same clock rates as the RS-II (375 MHz 604e runs 15.1 SPECint, 10.1 SPECfp,) so even if there are some other G4 improvements, I doubt the 500 MHz G4 will be beating a 733 MHz Pentium III.

Note that these benchmarks don't measure performance of vector-processing chip features like MMX used by a few apps like Photoshop.

--LP

P.S. (Sidebar: The minimal performance value-add of RISC over Intel is is why I think Linux's highly touted multi-architecture support for RISCs is exactly a glowing scalability feature as some apparently make it. I guess 64-bits and floating point comes in handy for a few apps. Other than that, it's a nice plus for legacy hardware that grows less relevant by the day. )

For Those Who Don't Get It

[Spud Zeppelin]

They're trying to broaden their base of professionals who know the idiosyncracies (to say the least) of their OS, see...

Incidentally, there's money to be made here. I use it at work. Extensively. We're a Tru64 shop. I get paid pretty well for knowledge I acquired a few years ago working for a company that happened to run its web server on Digital Unix because it's what we had lying around.

Why, now, a Tru64 shop? Well... we're running HUGE Oracle databases with a 3rd-party ERP system layered on top of them, for one. Another box runs a commercial database package for libraries, for which Tru64 is the preferred install platform.

And what sorts of nice things do you get out of Tru64 (TruCluster notwithstanding)? How about (this is a seriously incomplete list):

1. AdvFS, a true journaling filesystem with the capability to layout filesets (think of them as partitions) across multiple drives, bundling drives together as logical devices, etc.
2. The ability to do (or have it do for you) REAL hardware diagnostics on an Alpha. As in, "CPU1 fan failure, shutting down".
3. The ability (if you're running Compaq hardware and are willing to pay for it) to get SPECTACULAR warranty work... as in, fast, friendly field-service -- essential if you're running a large data center.
4. Options like C2 security...!

Don't get me wrong... I love open source software. I run both Linux and FreeBSD. But, what we're talking about here is a large industrial product, as in, competing with E-class Sun boxes and IBM mmf's. It wasn't designed to run a website for "Joe's T-Shirt Shack" and it would be overkill to select it for that... unless you happen to have (like we did a couple jobs ago) the hardware lying around.

This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

Solaris is also cheap -- for developers

[Sun Tzu]

I got the Intel copy of Solaris for about $20 last year under a developers program.

I'm not too sure how valuable these cheap SCO, Tru64 and Solaris OS's are with Linux and the *BSD's out there but, as a Sun admin, I had a particular interest. However, I run my own projects under Linux.

Re:Sorry folks, it's a sweet deal...

[NovaX]

What about NetBSD? NetBSD was the first open source OS to port to the Alpha, supports most alpha systems, etc. I'd guess NetBSD is a good deal ahead than Linux.

Re:Digital Unix is dead

[NovaX]

If I emember correctly, the origional plates were
UNIX
Live free or die

and were given out to the origional UNIX hackers. I'm not surprised that DEC did that.. I have one from Linux world (from compaq) with Linux. The anervsity version is out too. Just an old cool thing Bell Labs did, and everyone copied.

Run this at home!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me it takes a lot of poking around on the relevant pages to find out just what architecture Tr64 UNIX runs on. "Sure," you say, "everyone knows this is an Alpha-only OS," or maybe even "isn't the '64' part kind of a clue that this might not run on Intel chips?" but of the first six posts, one clearly thought this would run on something besides Alpha, and one had no idea why this was filed under "Compaq."

I'm sure the opposite must be true, too: that someone will think that since this is offered by Compaq, that it must run on the boxes Compaq actually makes money selling.

If I were Compaq, I'd be careful to mention here or there, maybe like on the order page, that this runs on machines that most people on this planet have never even heard of.

Me personally, I'd have bought one of these here Alpha boxes, but I've been waiting and waiting for them to at least get to beta. It's been years; what's the holdup?

Go to the bookstore and grab a Linux Journal

[Greyfox]

I picked up a copy of the latest Linux Journal and they were advertising two or three places where you could get Alpha hardware. Be warned that the stuff ain't cheap (You want a 21264 if you're going to go to the trouble of getting one...)

Re:Nice try, folks.

[bmetzler]

Your opinion may vary from mine, but I'll put money on my prediction that this offer from Compaq won't have too many takers.

I absolutely concur with you. In fact, if you talk to Compaq, I would almost guarentee that they would agree with you. Just because someone markets something, that doesn't mean that they are marketing it to *you*.

This is Tru64. It isn't a competitor to Linux. Those using Linux will use Linux. Those interested in Tru64, will find this offer interesting. And those interested people are those that Compaq is marketing this too.

-Brent
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Re:Tru64 At Home (Digital Unix)

[Cramer]

NECX's Outlet Center has 400MHZ Digital Server 3300's still in stock. Ignore the fact that they are the "UK" model. It takes exactly 5 seconds to convert it to "US" -- i.e. flip the power supply input voltage to 110 instead of 220 and plug in any US type IBM power cord. The UK model keyboard is a little weird by US standards, but you can use whatever PS/2 keyboard you want.

Of course, it's sans disk and RAM :-( Adequate SCSI hard drives are not expensive (4G is more than enough.) RAM, being 3.3V ECC EDO DRAM DIMMs, is a small problem. I ordered mine from The Outpost.