SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 Review 399
JigSaw writes "Despite news about SCO being all about the lawsuit, they still sell OS products and they have a presence in the server market. UnixWare is one of these OS products. Tony Bourke reviewed its latest version, 7.1.3, and even includes benchmarks among other tests. Tony concludes that 'the lack of commercial applications and user community, the difficulty with open source applications, the SCO litigation, and the high price are all marks against UnixWare. There are just very few reasons to adopt UnixWare as your platform, and plenty of reasons to adopt (or migrate to) other platforms.'"
A few.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SCO ? who uses it? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I support it or anything... =]
Boeing (Score:1, Informative)
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
I was poking through the SCO web site some time ago, to find good stuff for my SCO Report website [scolicense.com] and I discover SCObiz [sco.com]. Check it out. For $5,000 [sco.com], they'll basically give you a template site, with mediocre ecommerce ability. The datasheet is here (pdf) [sco.com], while the quick facts (pdf) [sco.com] is here. A Flash tour is here [sco.com].
The Flash tour is pretty snappy, but you can tell, it's nothing more than a glorified template driven website builder for newbies, similar to what Tripod [lycos.com] and Geocities [yahoo.com] provide with their drag and drop stuff. It's probably even worse.
Remember to visit SCO Report [scofiles.com], where I do my part to annoy SCO with the truth, and SCO Countdown [scocountdown.com], where there are clocks counting down to SCO's demise...
Surprise surprise yourself... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SCO ? who uses it? (Score:1, Informative)
My guess is that there's probably other schools that are using the same thing so they might also be running Unixware for their database servers.
Re:A prediction... (Score:5, Informative)
In your local Round Table Pizza, for example, long after everyone goes home for the night they might have a small computer that gathers receipt information from all the cash registers, makes a 14.4K modem call to a "mainframe" at headquarters, and uploads the sales data for that day. Every time on
Anyway. The point is that their brand getting tarnished is completely meaningless to this market. If they do what they say they'll do, Round Table will use them until some sales guy for some competitor (in point of sale systems) convinces them that they're wasting money.
Yes, it would be a good idea for them to spin off their actual products from their tort company, but not 'cause of their name.
wtf??? (Score:4, Informative)
Spun Where? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SVR4 based unix. (Score:4, Informative)
The Unixware test here is on a multi(2) processor PC, aside from the fact that "Despite using a dual-processor system, SMP support is a licensed feature, so this installation only recognized one of the two processors."
Other posters have pointed out that Unixware is used heavily in commercial situations - notably retail. - your "free" Solaris is not for this.
Despite all of the above , I have to agree when you ask "Why bother with SCO".
Re:SCO ? who uses it? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A prediction... (Score:4, Informative)
Since most cash registers you see are actually IBM terminals, businesses tend to buy their servers from IBM to get support for both the terminal AND the server.
Re:SVR4 based unix. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SCO ? who uses it? (Score:5, Informative)
Which SCO Unix? There are basically two, UnixWare being the subject of the post. The other is left as an exercise for the reader.
I know of a injection molding facility that monitors about 50 multi-million dollar presses 24x7 with UnixWare. It runs a vertical app that does alerting (voice announcement, paging, calls) and gathers stats.
UnixWare was an early (first?) commercial implementation of UNIX on i386 hardware. A lot of geeks were pretty excited by it long ago. This mattered because it meant that you could deploy UNIX apps cheaply. So, a lot of vertical apps were ported and UnixWare became pretty widespread. It was a fairly plain-jane port of UNIX with credible-enough vendor support to make it possible to sell products based on it without having customers retch on your shoes. It was an easy port from other UNIX platforms, and this was probably it's main claim to fame. The other being almost-workable integration with Netware fileservers (after Novell acquired it.) I am amused when I remember how it seemed pretty obvious to me that whoever was responsible for that Novell integration piece was learning UNIX in the process.
Just because SCO owns UnixWare doesn't make UnixWare bad. It's largely obsolete now, but 10 years ago if you wanted to run UNIX on i386 hardware, UnixWare (or whatever it might have been called in late 1993) was a good choice. There are products running happily on UnixWare today, their users utterly unaware of the legal hoopla.
Re:surprise surprise (Score:1, Informative)
Re:As a UNIX developer... (Score:5, Informative)
Some will say this tarnishes FOSS ideals. Helllllooooo! SCO wants to kill FOSS and unilateral disarmament is foolish. I'm in favor of any ethical way of isolating SCO and it's users. If the users find this inconvienient, they can pressure SCO to mend fences.
Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Installed UnixWare.
Common shells not installed automatically.
Tar has issues.
CDE barebones.
Software selection bad.
Has non GCC C compiler.
Does not have C++ compiler.
Cannot port many applications.
LKP pretty.
Did not really test security.
Don't bother asking for community help.
UnixWare fricken' expensive.
No plans for 64-bit.
In conclusion, UnixWare is dying.
Great review; good points. (Score:5, Informative)
The article was well-written and, I felt, fairly objective. My thanks to Mr. Bourke for keeping a level head when many are screaming bloody blue murder. For those who just want the meat, here it is:
These factors precluded the reviewer from really thinking of a single situation in which he could recommend UnixWare 7.1.3 as an installable option.
Re:SCO has a "skunkware" download site... (Score:3, Informative)
SCO software is used... *A LOT* (Score:1, Informative)
There are two companies that I know of that sell to a vertical market: the building materials industry.
Each company had two platforms: AIX and SCO. At first the SCO option was OpenServer, but then switched to UnixWare (mainly due to hype from SCO that NEVER materialzed... OpenServer and UnixWare were going to MERGE... but never happened)
Anyway, both companies are looking at AIX and RedHat Enterprise as their two platforms. Until they can test/train on RHEL, they are still selling Unixware. I even had a rep from both companies RECOMMEND Unixware now and will switch the company within 6 months to RedHat. Un-frickin-believable!
Anyway, get off the high-horse
SCO is used. It is still being sold. It will get replaced. But, the timeline is a little longer.
Like it or not... but, that's the case.
Re:surprise surprise (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I am NOSTRADAMUS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:WebMD (Score:2, Informative)
hmm (Score:4, Informative)
and I can back this guy, it does suck. not out of bias.. it just lacks a lot of things, and has a very slow boot.
I installed slack on one of the computer repair machines at school (which had unixware on it) and ran another machine with unixware on it and had them boot side by side...
slackware won. and it was on the slower machine.
it's old, and maybe this is what all the crap is about. sco wants linux since they know they cant create anything better than 30 year old code that they never created. (in other words...)
so, they figure they can buy linux out, but what's this? linux cant be bought out. but wait, it looks like unix, they can try to pull an infringement case! but wait, no evidence! ok, so maybe court trials wont work that way, but litigation will scare people into submitting into their whims, but no, it makes people angry... and so on..
truly, I fear to see what's going on in darl's head. I wonder if he was that special needs child that got 4-square balls thrown at him by other children.
that or life in utah (or wherever he's from) warped him.
who knows.. I'm rambling now because I'm half awake.
Re:wtf??? (Score:5, Informative)
SATA support is also pretty poor - several popular controllers either dont work, work at about half the speed in linux as they do under Windows, or won't work with software RAID-1 etc.
Have a look at recent postings to the Linux Kernel mailing list to see the nightmare that an NForce2-based board, or a SATA controller will give you under Linux.
I have both, and while I have got them to work, I had frequent hard lockups before i disabled all the ACPI/APIC stuff, my SATA controller doesn't work with software RAID-1 and 2.4 kernels gave me disk corruption and hard lockups under load.
However, The kernel developers are working on these issues, and with their help I was able to get my system up and running. I am confident that this stuff will be fully supported and stable under Linux, but unfortunately this is not the case today.
Re:surprise surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wtf??? (Score:2, Informative)
Which RAID controller is that? Any Linux distro should support any of the SCSI RAID controllers in the kernel, software RAID, as well as the excellent 3Ware ATA RAID controllers. If you're talking about ATA RAID controllers then just buy one from 3ware. They've consistently been friendly to the open source community by providing good GPL'd drivers for their stuff and I would go out of my way to buy their hardware again. If you're talking about the el-cheapo $50 software RAID controllers from Promise or Highpoint then you're wasting everyone's time. Just use Linux's software RAID.. it'd probably be faster.
Re:SCO ? who uses it? (Score:2, Informative)