[geeks] Tru64 licensing/availability...

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2002.07.02 18:42 Will Mc Donald wrote:

> anyone know what the score is with availability of Tru64 and its use
> on Digital Personal Workstation 433au's?
1. Is it really a "au"? Only the "au" can run the SRM console that Tru64
/ OpenVMS / (Net|Open|Free)BSD needs. The "a" is NT only. (I heard of
dirty tricks to convert the "a" to SRM, so that at least *BSD can run on
it.)
2. This is a really nice machine. I am typing this on a PWS 500au
running Tru64. You can expand the RAM with ordinary PeeCee (read cheap)
ECC SDRAM up to 1.5 GB. The "au" has a Qlogic ISP1020 UW SCSI adapter.
And EIDE, but who wants this? Graphics card can variate from PeeCeeish
ATI / Matrox cards to the high end 3D 4d[456]0t cards from Intergraph.
(On a par with the SGI Impact line.)

With Tru64 you will get a solid, mature and performant UNIX with a
strong BSD flavor that can Move Big Rocks (C) (R) (TM). It feels very
comfortable after a litle bit GNUification. (read: somthing better then
/bin/sh / /bin/csh.) I like it much more than e.g. HPUX. (This may
depend on my preference for BSD Unix in general. ;-) ) 

> I'm thinking of picking one up to have a play with but it comes 
> with NT installed and I'm not sure if Tru64 media's provided.
If it is a "au" you can get rid of NT easyly. The machine will run
NetBSD perfectly. (You may have a bit trouble to get X11 working,
depending on the graphics card.) I had NetBSD running on my 500au bevore
I installed Tru64 and it was fun. 

> Is it available anywhere under similar licensing to Solaris for
> machines with < 1 CPU? Thoughts? Potential gotchas?
You will need to spend 99$ for a media kit and a license, if this comes
not with your machine. My machine was running NT when it arrived, but
the Tru64 license was included. I don't know what the hobbyist license
coveres, but AFAIK the base user license includes cc, no c++ and no
advanced developement tools like the debugger. You can use AdvFS (You
wane use AdvFS!) but not Nice Features (C) (R) (TM) like snapshots, no
LVM, no Open3D (DEC incarnation of OpenGL), don't know about all that
nifty cluster stuff. I will have a cluster fuck when I got that PC 164
(500 MHz 21164A) running...
-- 



tsch,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/