From: jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 22:07:43 GMT
David Willmore (willmore@iastate.edu) wrote:
:
: >Ha! Like what, AIX? OSF/1? HP-UX? IRIX? If you think that any of these
: >things are half as stable or compatible as Linux, you're in for a big
: >surprise after spending the big bucks.
:
: What color is the sky in your world? Iowa State University is a DEC house
: and; therefore, uses ULTRIX. Linux has years to go before it can 'walk the
: walk' with full blown production Unixes like the ones above. If you think
: otherwise, you haven't been sitting on the edge of the Linux releases and
: living with uptimes in the hours and *sometimes* days.
:
Actually, I always get the latest Linux kernels, GNU utilities, XFree86 betas,
etc. I do *not* use networking, so I can't speak for that part of the OS.
Yes, the so-called production Unixes usually have solid networking. But,
have you ever tried to port non-trivial software to them? No? Let me tell
you a little story. In our efforts to port our molecular modeling software
to AIX/6000, we have uncovered enough "full stop" AIX bugs to force IBM to
release something like 27 patches, after which the X server still decides to
crash every half-hour or so, usually taking the machine down with it. No two
AIX patchlevels run our software exactly the same way. The DBX debugger
itself crashes all the time. It got so ridiculous that we had to take our
IBM product off the price list pending further AIX bug fixes. And please,
don't even get me started on HP-UX.
There are lots of areas where Linux kicks serious butt on everything else
out there. Linux's C library is more robust and compatible than any I've
seen. Nobody -- not SVR4, and not OSF/1 -- has a /proc file system as useful
as Linux's. No 386 Unix I've seen (except maybe SCO) has hardware support in
the same league as Linux. Linux is smaller and faster, especially under
heavy load than any commercial PC Unix, and has a richer set of utilities
available. The list goes on and on.
:
: I'm just looking around our network here for an example or two. Ok, here's
: a ReadOnly NFS server that's been up since Oct 1 1992. There are several
: more here with times in Nov and Dec '92. Anyone have a Linux system *that*
: stable? If you do, you're running .95 or earlier and therefor having that
: system up proves nothing about the stability of the current release of
: Linux.
:
You mention ULTRIX and dare to talk about current releases in the same
article? :-)
For truly current releases, try DEC's OSF/1 1.2 for the Alpha and HP-UX 9.1.
If you're truly brave, attempt to work with AIX/6000 3.2.3 for a while.
:
: David Willmore | "Ever noticed how much they look like orchids? Lovely!" |
: