Unix Archive

Addison-Wesley sent us in the hardcover second edition of the popular book title "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" and we had a quick look at this classic.

The end of the world is near. At last that of the Unix world. That's the prediction of Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner. "Linux is coming, Unix is dead." But there's no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, "an absolute".

Cygwin is a great alternative for those who feel constrained by working with the Windows environment. Cygwin lets you employ the best parts of each environment to fit your needs, whether through porting and development of applications, or simply using the applications in this flexible, powerful system.

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both surround and extend those found in the Linux group.

Like it or not, but sooner or later you realize that you'll have to write shell-scripts to administer UNIX. And among these scripts there certainly will be those to cooperate with interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, su, password, ssh. But it means the end of the admin's quiet life because while dealing with interactive programs one often come across numerous hidden traps which doesn't usually happen with ordinary sh-scripts. Though fortunately or may be not, but most of these problems generally turn up within first five minutes of the work under the script. The symptoms typically look like that author can't pass the authentication from the script. At first you feel confused because usual pipe constructions such as:

A pipe is a means by which the output from one process becomes the input to a second. In technical terms, the standard output (stout) of one command is sent to the standard input (stdin) of a second command. If you are not sure of the advantages this creates, then let's look at a simple example. Read more here.

This is a report on the third and final day of USENIX 2005. You might want to start at my report on Day one and then move to Day two. Day three of USENIX 2005 has come and is now almost gone. When you get to a conference, it always seems like the days will stretch on forever. Then before you know it, everything is all over and you are on your way home. Its kind of like summer camp, I guess.

This is a report on the second day of USENIX 2005. You might want to start with my report on day one. Day two started off a bit slowly. Oh wait, actually I started off a bit slowly. That could have been from the margaritas last night at La Casa Garcia, a Mexican restaurant a few blocks down the street from the Anaheim Marriott. Good Mexican food is one of the things I miss the most since I moved from California to New York two years ago. Luckily, the food at La Casa Garcia was excellent.

"Has it managed to completely escape the attention of the "open source" movement that Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and so forth have blithely continued to remain virtually Windows-only while waiting for the dust to settle? Only now they have realized that it won't settle and oh-so-quietly the rush of announcements of support for Linux has not translated into a rush of quality applications." Read the editorial here. I've written a similar editorial a few years back.

Much of today's enterprise-level software on UNIX caters to the business needs of large companies. And so it must support emerging technologies and follow the rapidly evolving market trends, such as the proliferation of the powerful, flexible Linux operating system. Because much of this software is large, multi-threaded, and multi-process, porting it to Linux presents challenges.

As data storage requirements increase and computing needs change, flexibility within server configurations and in storage configurations becomes more important. Find out how the HP Smart Array controller provides the tools you need in this chapter.

To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that you become quite comfortable with using the command line interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on computer resources. Find out more, in Ed Hurst's article.

Some time back, I promised to double-check Sun executive Larry Singer’s “Reality Check” missives on HP. A week ago, Mr. Singer penned a Reality Check that, in light of HP’s decision to cancel its TruCluster integration effort, does in fact reflect more reality than rhetoric. It also reflects Mr. Singer’s opinions, some of which differ from mine. Presented herewith is Larry’s write-up, laced with a few comments of my own.

Early Wednesday morning 1 December, our colleagues at The Inquirer ran a story entitled “HP expected to drop Trucluster from HP-UX” on their web site. According to the story, unnamed sources claimed that HP soon will announce that TruCluster technology is unlikely to be incorporated into HP-UX. More here.