Unix Archive

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.

This is the 30th anniversary of USENIX, the Advanced Computer Association. USENIX was started in 1975 as 'The Unix Users Group' and has been holding regular conferences ever since (along with many other activities, of course). USENIX focuses on the Unix world, including unix-like OSes like Linux. The USENIX conference is the place to go if you want to find out about topics such as advanced system administration or the latest filesystem research projects. USENIX is a blend of academic presentations and socialization. If you want to ask Andy Tanenbaum what he thinks of Linux, you can do it at USENIX.

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.

Glueing together Cygwin's odds and ends to make life on your Linux-by-way-of-Windows desktop more comfortable.

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.

So you want to start programming UNIX shells. You could sit down with a dense volume of coding advice, but you're a techie. You want to jump right in and start coding. This chapter will help you get started right away with shell programming in UNIX.

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.

Charles Keenan provides specific tasks for setting up a Serviceguard high availability cluster on HP-UX/Linux, including example commands to help illustrate key points.

Expose the power of Bash shell, tutorial here.

This quick guide is based on true story, and is contributed to the community with the intent to be helpful to the department, office and enterprise Managers, network Administrators and support Staff, and Small Business Owners.

Peter Hall from HP has responded to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. Apparently HP is still committed to the HP-UX operating system.

Optimizing the performance of a system can save your company a considerable amount of money. In this chapter, you'll see how to streamline your system for maximum efficiency.

HP has sent a letter to Sun that complains about the inflammatory nature of Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog entries, according to this report. Apparently it is in response to Schwartz saying that HP's Unix operating system is dying.

OneFinger is a general-purpose GUI for composing CLI commands with the mouse. Although entirely graphical, it does not attempt to hide the underlying CLI language. Requires Python for Qt3.