Unix Archive

"Technology professionals have loosely used the term 'UNIX' since the first person had to explain the difference between the Berkeley and AT&T flavors, so it's not surprising to find as many UNIX standards as there are versions of the operating system. Peter Seebach wades through the wellspring of UNIX standards and sorts them out for you, concluding that the rumors of the death of UNIX are (as usual) greatly exaggerated."

"UNIX and Windows data-center market share remain neck-and-neck, according to most analysts, but many in IT perceive UNIX and Linux innovation as slowing to a crawl. We interviewed representatives from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems who were eager to challenge that perception by highlighting areas in which their UNIX OSs are breaking new ground."

"The Amadeus project was initiated by USL as a successor or alternative to UNIX. As well as SCO other industrial contributors include USL, Novell, Chorus Systemes, Unisys1, Fujitsu and Sequoia. Amadeus has existed as a labs project for many years with Unisys being the first to put it into production usage in their OPUS high end database server." Read more .

"Is Unix dead? My answer is no, it's not dead. As a matter of fact, I think I hear it laughing on its way to the bank. Fewer Unix systems are being shipped, but they're commanding a higher premium than ever. Unix still represents a $2 billion market, the largest operating-system market by far. Despite Windows Server recent gains, it still represents about $1.6 billion , when you're looking at operating system-only revenues. And Linux in terms of revenues represents one-tenth of what the good, gray Unixes combined represent. Granted the future belongs to Linux, but as a $2 billion market, is Unix dead?"

A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools.

Umeet Meeting 05 arrived to the sixth edition of the conference. The conference will take place online (IRC, WWW) on December, 9-20. We would like to welcome this time to everybody who wants to join us together with friends we met at previous editions. Registration and attendance is free. Speakers like Aaron Seigo (KDE), Rodrigo Moya (GNOME), Marcus Brinkman (GNU/Hurd), Rik Van Riel (Redhat), Alejandro Sánchez Acosta (GNU), Michael Meeks (OpenOffice), César Lopez Nataren (Mono), and other important hackers will be talking about the free software desktop, security and operating systems.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.5 of their cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. All software is carefully packaged for easy deployment on 19 different Unix platforms, including FreeBSD 4.11/5.4/6.0/7.0, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 4, SUSE Linux 9.3/10.0, Mandriva Linux 10.2 and Sun Solaris 8/9/10. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating to GCC 4.0, further improving the Solaris 10, FreeBSD 6.0 and SUSE 10.0 support.

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.

This seems to be a sensitive question for some people, particularly at Sun Microsystems. While IBM stated this week they had increased their market share over last year's, Sun also had its own press release this week claiming that it is the number one Unix platform server vendor in the world, in both revenue and unit shipments. It turns out they are both right.

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.

The US Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme, the body that grants Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) ratings in the US has granted an EAL5 Augmented to BAE System’s XTS-400 and the STOP Unix operating system. This is the first OS to be granted a EAL5 or better and is the first public EAL5 granted in the US. Read more for details.

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:

JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping.

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.