For those who have experience with Unices that aren't GNU/Linux or BSD, what is your opinion on them?
Is there any cool feature or component they have that you wish Loonix or BSD had? Is there any feature or component that Loonix or BSD have that you wish they didn't? Are projects like Illumos/OpenIndiana representative of the Solaris experience? Do you think there's a possibility for some of these systems or a version of them to be open-sourced in the future, as with OpenSolaris/Illumos/OpenIndiana? If so, which ones?
Well you arent getting replies because there's not much to say. Linux and BSD took over the *nix world because they came to do everything that all the other Unix flavors did. Often better and while being free software. ZFS was the last compelling thing that originated in one of the non-Linux/BSD systems, and both of them have it now. There's a reason Oracle is basically saying "We'll squeeze all the money we can out of companies that are committed to Solaris, and then let it die"
Luis Nelson
nobody? yall just want to talk about NN or indians or intel vs ryzen for the 10 millionth time? ok then...
Nicholas Parker
I doubt anyone here is old enough to have worked on any of the original/proprietary Unix essays. Especially given the fact that they were mostly hardware specific and used mostly as mainframes.
Alexander White
yay a person!
So systems like HP-UX and AIX have nothing unique of value? I would think there'd be at least something cool about those that sets them apart from the rest
Jackson Baker
Unixes not Unix essays Pls forgive my phone posting
they're pretty much just legacy systems that haven't been replaced. Some big business built infrastructure on them way back when and prefers to fork out a lot of money for a support contract to keep that shit running as-is, rather than rebuilding it. They used to have unique features (like running on a different architecture) but they no longer do. One company with their own Unix flavor can't hope to match the development power of the whole Linux ecosystem.
Leo Garcia
ah so it's literally just to keep legacy shit updated? Because these pages seem to be advertising these operating systems
Kevin Bennett
Illumos is a continuation of OpenSolaris (which Oracle put a bullet in as soon as they bought Sun, since there wasn't a way for them to make money off of it) and it's mostly a community project for people who were on Solaris or OpenSolaris but (again) think "I don't wanna rebuild it, can't I just keep what I have?"
AIX, HP-UX, closed Solaris... I mean yeah, of course, the companies behind them are gonna have product pages for them, you gotta pitch what you have, but that doesn't mean anyone not already in it is buying it, or that there's much in the way of new development going on.
Kayden Rivera
Okay, brah, there comes a point in time when you've plunged yourself so deep into the hipster OS rabbit hole that you're not actually running an operating system at all. You are dangerously close to passing that point, provided you haven't already.
One of the key features of an operating system's usefulness is in the software it's capable of running. Regardless of how you feel about the clans warring it out in the endless "Windows vs. Linux" debate, they have a fairly strong point when it comes to software availability. To be fair, GNU/Linux is coming along really nicely when it comes to supporting as much software as a Windows machine does. It's not perfect parity, but it's a far cry better than it used to be. All that said, I can still see why people prefer Windows in some respects. It's nice to never have to worry about whether or not a piece of software you'd like to use will run on your machine.
Just outside of "Windows vs. Linux" town is BSD and Mac users. They're mostly happy with their available software. Mostly.
And now we're in whatever backwater hipster shithole you're hanging out in. For fuck's sake, man, do you even have a modern browser on any of those esoteric systems? Is a browser the ONLY thing you have? Is the entirety of your computer usage web surfing and the occasional email? A quick GNU/Linux install would've handled that for you just fine. You might even be able to watch a video or play a game occasionally. Maybe even write a letter. You know, because you have actually a library of useful/entertaining software available to you.
Also, this is Sup Forums. If you're asking about an operating system here then you mean to use it on your desktop machine as a "daily driver", so let's avoid any disingenuous nonsense about "running a server farm in your bedroom" or "needing to decode DNA sequences in the basement".
Aaron Brooks
seriously, calm down.
No one was talking about running this shit as a daily driver. Read the questions again. They're mostly about what could be taken from these systems into Loonix or BSD.
Let's make this even more clear for you. Init systems. What are they like on these OSes? would more modern *nixes benefit from some features from these?
that sort of thing.
Gabriel Sanchez
or system loggers, shells, whatever
Nathaniel Thompson
>shells ksh93. Korn Shell is one of the best around: it feels refreshing to use. You can read the man page top to bottom easily, yet it still comes with many novel and useful features. It can convert glob to regex. It can convert regex to glob. It has floating-point variables. It was originally only on System V, but it's entirely open-source now and available everywhere: I wish more people tried it out. It's better than pdksh for sure.
Jaxson Gonzalez
Never tried it but people who have say templeOS shell is really clever.
Ayden Anderson
I think Solaris can handle arguments in shebangs
Xavier Smith
AIX is closely tight to the hardware it runs on: pSeries. For what I know, it is highly optimised and preferred for mission critical applications to Linux, if the hardware can be afforded. Also, pSeries machines allow to create physical partitions of your hardware to run AIX and Linux at the same time, from what I know benchmarks in that case always show AIX as more performing. Also, as pointed out, they are still used to run legacy applications of which nobody know anything anymore (from a code point of view) and which would be too expensive to replace or port to x86
Liam Gomez
See, this is what i'm talking about!
>ksh Apparently it's preinstalled on MacOS, so i'm trying it out now. It started in vi mode for whatever reason, but I was able to change that with set -o emacs. From a usabiltiy/interactive perspective, this is actually quite nice! It's blazing fast, and the tab completion is really neat looking, with everything being in a little numbered list. pic related. I wonder why more stuff doesn't use this? It seems great!
>Solaris can handle arguments in shebangs I'm not sure what the practical applications of that would be, but I understand what you're referring to, and I think it's interesting that other *nixes don't have this.
>AIX better performance on its supported hardware Cool! Although I wonder how much of that could be mitigated by compiler optimizations and whatnot, as seen in systems such as Sup Forumsentoo
Carter Garcia
Forgot the pic related
Christopher Cooper
I don't know any Unices that can't do this, though.
Christopher Ward
After the numbered list is printed, just write the number you want to auto-complete and press TAB again and it will write it out for you.
Jaxson Rivera
>I wonder why more stuff doesn't use this? It seems great! Because we live in a GNU/Linux monoculture, where people who try new things are shunned. But yes, the numbered lists are great for autocompleting Japanese filenames and such.
Angel Gomez
>we live in a GNU/Linux monoculture, where people who try new things are shunned Mostly true, although a quick search reveals that Alpine seems to be doing really good on Docker, and has gotten pretty popular there, so it's not like Linux - GNU isn't a thing
Blake Jackson
I have experience with HP-UX and AIX.
HP-UX is my favourite Unix because it's mostly well-designed and configuration is generally simpler than on Linux (var[i]=value that's easily sourcable by shell, vs metric tonnes of XML that RedHat is pushing). ioscan is able to scan, display, and filter all connected hardware in one nice command (check out the Linux clone lshw with the -short option). Command names generally have the syntax of , so you can write hpvm and press TAB to see all actions you can do with the VM. LVM is very simple yet powerful and can easily do mirroring and striping.
AIX should not be even considered Unix because it has more in common with IBM's mainframe OSs than with Unix as far as design goes. Different for the sake of being different (/etc/filesystems instead of fstab), full of opaque binary formats used for configuration, cli commands can be so complicated everyone just uses the tui tool 'smit' for all but the most trivial tasks. They also got the command naming wrong and use syntax. Want to know what commands pertain to logical volumes? Tough luck because they are names lslv, mklv, etc. Also, the above mentioned /etc/filesystems has a completely different format with multi-line entries that make grep completely useless. Don't get me wrong: it's a very stable system and can work for years uninterrupted, but if something breaks there's a good chance you're only going to fix it by burning it down and starting afresh. It's just so easy to hate AIX.
>var[i]=value that's easily sourcable by shell Reminds me of BSD rc.conf. Nice.
Joshua Jones
Wow nice! This is definitely the kinda stuff I was looking for
>configuration is generally simpler >vs metric tonnes of XML that RedHat is pushing That's another thing that's interesting here. RedHat, and more specifically Poettering, have been trying to push things in a more windows-like direction. Granted, all of it is Free Software, which is excellent, but from a design perspective, there's a lot of people who don't like it. You can even see it from Poettering's statements. I've seen a few where he highlights Windows and MacOS as the inspiration for some of the things he and RedHat are pushing. That's part of why looking at these other Unices is a good idea. What might they be doing that we could make use of?
>check out lshw -short I just did. It's really convenient and nice. I'll be sure to remember it in future.
>Command names generally have the syntax of Yeah it would take a lot of redoing shit to make this work on modern unices. Commands today are mostly .
>easily do mirroring and striping. Neat!
Isaiah Brooks
>POO in shell scripts wew
Sebastian Collins
Also, with regards to LVM, how is it simpler/different compared to Loonix LVM?
Benjamin Gray
This. There is nothing exiting about Unices.
Tyler Flores
>No one was talking about running this shit as a daily driver. Nah, you were.
>Init systems. >What are they like on these OSes? Ever use systemd?
>would more modern *nixes benefit from some features from these? Apparently at least one interested party thought so, as we now have systemd.
Justin Bell
So the init systems on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and OpenSolaris forks are all like systemd? I find that hard to believe
afaik, Poettering was mostly inspired by MacOS's launchd
wish it had more support, cause it's one of the very few sanely designed OSes it seems. As it stands, it's pretty bare, and mostly useful for learning how OS stuff works with pic related.
Adrian Barnes
The most hipsterish UNIX OS is probably SGI's IRIX, which is based on System V UNIX and a bunch of BSD and GNU components. It only runs on very specific MIPS hardware that's somewhat rare now and kind of expensive for what it is. The more powerful workstations that are in fully working condition go for 1000-5000 USD on ebay. Parts are really hard to find most of the time. IRIX itself is a bitch to install and get working. Due to most of the hardware being custom made by SGI with very little documentation, there's currently no way to run it in a virtual machine. There are some people on Nekochan that are working on getting it to run in QEMU. They were able to get a partial headless boot but they've hit a major roadblock with the graphics. Emulation of SGI graphics hardware will have to be written from scratch and it'll take years, since the hardware will probably have to be analyzed using destructive methods, which is a terrible shame.
I really wish that SGI would start making MIPS workstations again and modernize all of the IRIX internals and sell them at a reasonable price (like under $5000).
All jokes aside though, I do agree that it would be nice if it had more support as just a regular Operating System, and not another free component of a fully functioning Botnet system made useful by the MINIX 3 corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full Botnet as defined by Intel
>Yeah it would take a lot of redoing shit to make this work on modern unices. Commands today are mostly . No, I mean command *names* follow that syntax. So for example commands to do with logical volumes are lvdisplay, lvcreate, lvextend, etc. (before someone asks, Linux's LVM was based on HP-UX).
But there's also the thing with modern Linux preference towards quasi-shells that also take the commands as arguments. For example virsh, pcsh, lvm (which is a single command on Linux, with symlinks for compatibility), etc. Interesting design differences.
Everything is based around extents and how they are allocated. Depending on what allocation policy you set, you can easily make RAID, mirrors, JBOD, etc. And it works by system allocating logical extents on physical volumes in a certain way - round-robin across selected disks for RAID0, if you add a mirror you have RAID10, there's also continuous allocation if you have different-sized disks. And if something fucks up, you can easily fix it just by reordering the extents how you need them.
Christopher Gomez
And XFS is still around. There's also the MaXX Interactive Desktop which is a fork of of the IRIX Interactive Desktop and 4dwm (now called 5dwm) and there are a bunch of old IRIX utilities that the dev got the source for, including the hardware inventory (hinv) utility.
Eli Stewart
>commands to do with logical volumes are lvdisplay, lvcreate, lvextend >lvm (which is a single command on Linux, with symlinks for compatibility) I agree. That's definitely a difference in design. I guess the former is more """unix philosophy""" of do one thing and do it well
Camden Adams
And that's ultimately what this thread is about. I don't think anyone aside from the extremely autistic is going to be wanting to use this shit as a daily driver, but we can look at these older systems and see what components would improve Loonix or BSD, or at least provide some cool stuff. I use XFS all the time, and I dunno if you know this, but RedHat/CentOS has actually made it the default on all new installations.
Charles Jenkins
I find this interesting because it also installs with LVM by default and you can't shrink XFS at all. So there's no "temporary" extension of any of the system volumes.
Isaac Johnson
I don't know why but I've found that XFS is overall faster for day to day tasks than EXT3/4 when using it on an SSD. Boot time is faster, opening programs is faster, and copying large files is significantly faster. I know you can't shrink it but it's great if you're dedicating the entire disk to it. I use it on my laptop and my desktop that run Fedora.
Evan Thomas
I've noticed the same
Daniel Bennett
Depends on the definiton of "work". One of the hospitals belonging to the university I study at still has a MRI scanner running HP-UX. My eyes probably lit up when I saw fucking "Unix Terminal" icon on the screen. The remaining machines run some flavour of GNU/Linux. Helios I think.
Wyatt Robinson
This. I recently had to make a custom PSU for a PowerMac G4 MDD for someone who needs some old as shit PCI cards that only have drivers for Mac OS 9, and the G4 MDD is the last machine that'll run it. Not UNIX, I know, but still.
Dominic Price
They are actually pretty common in big enterprises. They are slowly dying, though, maybe with the exception of AIX which piggybacks on the success of POWER.
Brandon Hill
I'm terribly curious of the purpose of said card was that someone was ready to put up with such old hardware
Bentley Cox
Not really sure about the exact purpose, but I was told it had something to do with an old offset printer.
Ryder Wright
Isn't that book pretty expensive? Too bad the book isn't under an open source licence.
Liam Bailey
libgen-dot-io is your friend
Nolan Nelson
wow someone actually revived this thread!
So earlier I brought up init systems. and this user made the claim that these unices' inits are all systemd-like to which I was quite skeptical Anyone have any insight into this? What are/were they really like?
