[rescue] New acquisition... (AIX)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Mike Meredith wrote:

> Then you don't know much about Linux do you ?

On the contrary.  I've been running it (in a somewhat decreased capacity
since 2001) for 8 years.

> Linux at the core is pretty much just Unix (not "UNIX(tm)" but neither
> is *BSD), so at the shell prompt, you can do pretty much what you can
> do with *BSD or a proper UNIX (the kernel is a different matter ...
> proper UNIX tends to scale on SMP/(cc)NUMA machines better).

At the core, sure.  But there's a lot more than that core in the 50MB
tarball that is the Linux kernel source.  There's a lot of useless crap
and half-implemented drivers in there that I've been bitten by more than
once.

Also, the development process of one team maintaining the kernel, and
1000 or so different teams each maintaining a single tool is irritating.
While the BSDs derive a lot of their tools from the FSF sources, they
tend to be forks that are specifically maintained by the OS team, giving
it a nice amount of uniformity.

Also, firewalling and packet-filtering/translation under Linux is a
trainwreck.  NFS performance sucks, devfs is wordy as all hell, and the
device naming scheme is brain damaged.  More than once I've upgraded a
kernel on a machine with two different types of, say, Ethernet cards or
SCSI cards, and.... Whooops!  eth0 is now eth1 because the device-probe
stuff changed.  Every other Unix I've ever used (aside from AIX, which
also does the lame enX naming) uses device names specifically to avoid
this problem.

> One of the things I can't stand is the idea that a proper administrator
> can't operate a Linux box, a FreeBSD box, and a Solaris box pretty much
> equally competantly.

I don't disagree with that.

> > I have no deep quarrel with MS.  They make a fine officeware suite and
>
> Word is fine ?!? Strange that I hear so many complaints about it then.

Well, okay.  Word 2000 sucks.  Word XP is a lot better.  Word 97 is what
I use at home (when I have to) because it's, IMO, the best release they
ever had.  Also, I'd kill for an Access-alike (that didn't suck) on Unix
for quickly prototyping things.

> My quarrel with MS is simply that they lock users into their
> applications with proprietry file formats

EVERYTHING that isn't a published standard is proprietary!

And, besides, the latest versions office store documents as XML.

> There's always the "FreeBSD distribution of Linux" :)

Yeah, I've stooped to that before.  I felt dirty.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Being on the Internet is not the same as being
Elgin, TX         (   famous.  That's like calling Cheetos 'dinner'."
USA                )                                    --Metal Steve