donn@albion.utah.edu (Donn Seeley) (12/02/89)
I feel a bit timid about mentioning this in a newsgroup that seems to be devoted to hpux, but here goes. I hope this doesn't sound too much like a sales pitch... From: seligman@CS.Stanford.EDU (Scott Seligman) Subject: HP-UX: unacceptable [Was: root-over-nfs under HP-UX 6.5] Date: 20 Nov 89 22:20:05 GMT ... My university is buying new equipment all the time. Some voices can be heard saying "Consider HP! Great stuff!" But someone will always add "But what about their networking software?" What can I say? If you are frustrated by the lack of sources for HP-UX, and you already run Berkeley Unix on VAXen, you might consider running Berkeley Unix on your HPs too. I want to say up front that this is NOT a panacea -- hpux is a commercial operating system, Berkeley Unix is a research operating system. But if you want to make name service run faster or if you want to fix an NFS bug or if you want the latest and greatest networking, AND you are prepared to cope with real Berkeley Unix: you should run 4.3 BSD instead of hpux. Currently mt Xinu sells Berkeley Unix for HP 9000 series 300 (68k based) workstations. It comes with the latest Sun NFS with diskless support, 4.3-tahoe disk labels, up-to-date TCP/IP support and other goodies, and of course full sources are available. Many (perhaps most) 6.x hpux binaries will run unchanged on Berkeley Unix; this includes things like X servers and Starbase applications. mt Xinu probably would like me to mention that they sell binary licenses too. I think I'll save my flame about the C compiler for another day. Berkeley Unix on HPs uses the GNU C compiler from FSF. I won't say that GCC is necessarily less buggy than hpux C, but it does come with complete sources and it is not tied to a commercial release schedule. All of our system software is compiled with GCC using full optimization. Since HP is providing some support to FSF, we hope that GCC on HPs with Berkeley Unix will remain well-supported in the future. Our group here at Utah is responsible for the 4.3 port, and we are continuing to improve it and upgrade it. I want to say that we have received generous support from HP for this work and we're very grateful for it. If hpux is 'unacceptable' because you need the features of a research system like Berkeley Unix, I hope the 4.3 BSD port gives you a reason to consider buying HP anyway. End sales pitch, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@cs.utah.edu 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 utah-cs!donn