I'm not sure if I qualify as an "old DECie", but my Digital experience
dates back to 1977, further if you go prior to my hire date.
Well, first there was Ultrix, then there was OSF/1; Digital Unix grew
out of OSF/1 (and was called DEC OSF/1 in its early days), and now
there's Tru64, which is just a rename of Digital Unix. So they're all
pretty much linear - evolution-wise.
Since the early Digital Unix days (back when it was DEC OSF/1), it has
supported (mostly via symlinks and environment variables) the BSD, SYS
V, and the Ultrix file layout - all simultaneously! (Whenever I did a
compile, I usually just crossed my fingers and looked the other way -
the .h files were really twisted - oddly enough, most of the time the
compiles worked). Strict POSIX compliance is acheived by setting an
environment variable. (And personally, I don't recommend developing in a
*STRICT* Posix environment; its not fun. Sorta like driving on the
"wrong" side of a road.)
Tru64 still ships with the "Freeware" CD(s), which has nearly all GNU
and Berkeley software that can be ported to 64 bits and doesn't have a
problematic license or copyright.
As far as system managment commands... well, its like SunOS, Solaris,
SCO, ... Tru64 has its own way of doing things. At least for most
predictible system admin tasks, you can do system administration via
either a GUI or a curses interface. And all the major subsystems have
command line interfaces.
When scalability is an issue, I recommend Tru64 over Linux. Tru64 has
better filesystems, supports more of everything (disks, network
adapters, CPUs, RAM, ...) If commercial liability is an issue, I'd
recommend either Tru64 or SunOOS over Linux - there's more at stake for
the commercial OS vendors than there is for the Linux vendors. Linux has
such a high value ratio (cost/performance) that its vendors can't afford
the invenstment that commercial vendors can.
If scalability or liability is not an issue, then I prefer Linux -
there's just more software for Linux than there is for Tru64 - comparing
desktop use, I prefer Linux over anything else - SunOS, Solaris, Tru64,
SCO, Windows, NT, Mac, .Its more robust and one gets a lot more software
for the dollar (if whole a dollar even comes into play). Plus, if push
comes to shove, I can support it myself and may any changes that the
vendor can't or won't.
Just my opinion!
Derek Martin wrote:
>
> Today, Jerry Feldman gleaned this insight:
> Bah, HTML... Anywayz, my question is to you Jerry, and all the other old
> DECies out there. How does Tru64 Unix compare to OSF/1 and/or Digital
> Unix (version 3 maybe?), and how do those compare to Linux, from an
> administrative perspective.
>
> Obviously it's a 64-bit OS, but I'm not really interested in that. I'm
> interested in the directory structure, the management commands, how much
> free software (i.e. GNU utils) ships with the OS... yada yada yada.
> How POSIX compliant is it, is it more SysV or BSD-ish? Comment on this
> in whatever way you feel like it.
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