A few weeks back, at the end of December, FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 was released. FreeBSD 7 will no doubt prove to be quite revolutionary. For one thing, this will be the first major FreeBSD release in a number of years. FreeBSD 6.0 was released in November of 2005, so there has been quite some time for the development of FreeBSD 7 to take place.
We have all no doubt heard by now of SCO Group Inc. filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This news made me think back to what might be considered the “Golden Age” of SCO. Now, I’m talking of the company formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation, not today’s SCO Group. Nevertheless, much of the same software is involved, and that is where my focus will be.
In recent discussion at Slashdot about “refocusing” the development of Linux, it was suggested that the various distributions should standardize on a common software package installation and management system. If that were ever to happen, which is quite unlikely, then pkgsrc would probably be the best option.
A colleague forwarded me the link to these sed, ed and awk reference sheets. One great thing about them is that they’re available in text form, so they’re easily viewable on UNIX systems where X hasn’t be installed, or otherwise isn’t running.
I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.
Sun’s Solaris operating system has numerous useful features that really aren’t found in other OSes, including Linux. Every so often I hear a Linux user say, “I’d love to be able to use that feature of Solaris!” One example is in this Slashdot comment, where the poster wishes that there was a ZFS-like filesystem for Linux.
Today I shared the experience a friend had with one of the companies he works with. It involved a failed transition from what was mainly a console-based suite of applications powered by Sun systems and Oracle, to an AJAX and Web-based system running on Windows, .NET and SQL Server. It seems that that entry was submitted to Reddit, and so I’ve been reading some of the comments that were left there.
Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I’ll describe the situation he encountered.
Every so often I hear somebody come along and compare the fragmentation of the various Linux distributions today to the “UNIX Wars” of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I find it somewhat funny when that happens, as I think that the situation is quite different.
First of all, the article mentions there being over 300 different Linux distributions. There were nowhere near that many UNIX vendors in the late 1980s. So the scale of fragmentation isn’t even remotely close.