> Has anybody around here ever used HP-UX or AIX or any > other relevant non-BSD, non-Linux UNIX-style > operating system before?
I use HP-UX every day, especially since I have HP-UX servers at home and do heavy development and system engineering on HP-UX. > If so, what do you think are the disadvantages and > advantages of these other operating systems vis-a-vis > Solaris? - HP-UX has POSIX binaries in /usr/(s)bin, something Solaris still does not have (POSIX XPG4 is in /usr/xpg4/bin, XPG6 is in /usr/xpg6/bin, not in PATH by default). - HP-UX is *hardcore* forward and backward compatible; moreso than Solaris, and that's a good thing! - the compilers are excellent, state of the art, and very similar in capabilities to Sun Studio! - HP-UX has /etc/PATH and /etc/MANPATH, the greatest thing since sliced bread... try to guess what those are for (I'd love to finally see that integrated in Solaris, I have the code ready and working) - the OS is high performance; really, really fast, and he's rock-solid-stable; this is probably his main strength and motivation for deploying HP-UX - the software management subsystem, SD-UX, is in most respects way more advanced that even the latest IPS (indeed, IPS looks like a toy in comparison to SD-UX, and so do pkgadd(1M) and friends): SD-UX supports bundles, products, subproducts - hierarchically ordered, limited regular expression version matching, "match what target has". Some of the disadvantages: - SD-UX *does not* remove empty directories upon software removal (unbelievable, but true!) - SD-UX does not appear to have an equivalent of class action scripts like pkgadd(1M) and friends do - HP-UX has no way (at least not in 11.23 - 11i v2) to power the hardware off (or perhaps the hardware has no software poweroff) - runs only on hp proprietary hppa and ia64 platforms (in reality, 11i v3 runs only on ia64 nowadays, and a few select hppa models) - has practically no free open source software bundled with him (hp's "internet bundle" is really, really LAME - and old!) - every piece of software is installed in its own separate directory: /opt/tcsh, /opt/blabla, ... - not available to the public, you have to have bought the hardware to get the media, and even then, it might very well be locked down for use by only so many users - MirrorUX is an additional, licensed product, costing extra, as do the compilers, which in this day and age is intolerable I chuckle every time when some GNU/Linux wannabe here gripes about how Solaris is missing this, that, or the other; they should try working on HP-UX, *THEN* they would know, what a bare OS looks like!!! For example, I had to compile my own python(1), get my own Mercurial hg(1) working, my own ncurses(3C), my own screen(1) utility - even my own less(1)! (Yes, I know about the hp-ux archive and porting center, and I hate it, because they don't know what they are doing, stuffing everything into /usr/local, which is against the System V spec!) All things considered, and you'll often read me write this here, HP-UX is a System V UNIX; and being one, apart from the hardware dependent commands, HP-UX is very, very similar to Solaris; oldskool System V folks should feel right at home on HP-UX. All in all, excellent OS, it's really too bad hp is *intentionally* killing him by not doing what Sun has done for Solaris. > I found this interesting link that compares HP-UX to > Solaris and seems to argue heavily in favor of > Solaris being easier to use: > > http://loudermilk.org/software/solaris-hpux.html That is an old, well known essay. I don't believe either is easier to use over the other; again, they're both System V UNIXes, so if you know Solaris, you know HP-UX, and vice-versa; those few platform dependent commands can be learned fairly quickly and painlessly in both operating systems. That is also one of the reasons why System V, apart from being strictly engineered to spec, is vastly superior to GNU: it's consistent and ubiquitous. > down compared to Red Hat with it's: Starting this [ > OK ] / [ FAILED ] messages. Now you know where GNU/Linux *lifted* it from: HP-UX! And the chkconfig(1M) was lifted from IRIX 6.5! Basically, anything that is cool in GNU/Linux was stolen from a System V UNIX, be it Solaris, IRIX, or HP-UX. > I also didn't mention any of the other non-BSD Unices > because I've been doing some research and SGI's IRIX The most advanced, way ahead of his time System V UNIX ever: IRIX. Even Apple computer's OS X still hasn't caught up to him in terms of user friendlyness and audio/video capabilities, and considering IRIX hasn't been developed since 2006, that says a lot; and the software management subsystem still has no match in the computer industry; it is still the most intelligent and most advanced, bar none. > Remember- in the end... there can be only one! Yes - System V! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
