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HPs Linux Push 58

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-I-gotta-find-a-new-icon dept.
An anonymous reader wrote in to hook us up with a link to a ZD article about HP and Linux. Its a good follow up to the announcement that they are releasing their own custom version of GDB. The article talks about HP not wanting to be outdone by IBM, and more interestingly, that they plan to embrace Open Source Development and not just the Linux Operating System.
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HPs Linux Push More

HPs Linux Push

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  • I thought it was particularly interesting that HP wants to support Linux partly to catch up to IBM.

    Last year, when Linux was really just starting to get mainstream attention, a number of companies started to support Linux in some way because they thought it was interesting.

    Now it looks like we're going to be seeing more and more people supporting Linux to stay competetive, because they're expected to support it. Soon enough, companies that aren't particularly interested in Linux (and perhaps don't even like it for some reason) will have to support it just because everyone else does. That's a great sign!

    In particular, it makes me think that we can make the same push with software freedom over the next few years. If enough companies (and especially big names like HP) become interested in free software, soon their competitors will have no choice!

  • As another person said, it depends on what you do.
    But IMO when you compare an OS with another on a generic level you should ignore any special "features" they might come with, like LVM or journalled file systems. That's like an application anyway. It's like blindly saying one car is better than another because it has no-flat tyres or something.
    As far as Unix is concerned there are IMO a couple of real losers out there: 1: Ultrix. 2: HP-UX. AIX is full of strange bugs and annoyances, but it's much more mainstream to work with (and definitely getting even more mainstream), but do an "ls" in AIX 4.1 or 4.2, then ask yourself "now where the h*** did my files go??" Repeat the command and suddenly they're back. That's something you can get used to, it's worse when sockets stop working on the SP/2 switch for no apparent reason and you have to reboot. Then there are unkillable processes, memory leaks (a workstation here with 64MB RAM has to be rebooted every two weeks because it eats all the memory. And it's doing nothing.. we don't use it for anything. It's *idle* all the time. Compare that to my heavy-duty Linux box with uptimes over a year and not a byte leaked (X11 up all the time too).
    But I would still say AIX is better than HP-UX or Ultrix. Solaris is probably ok but I just don't enjoy working with it. IRIX is good. Linux is good. SCO pre-Unixware was pretty bad to work with, but not necessarily buggy though. I don't know about Unixware. I have no personal experience with the *BSDs but from what I hear they are good too. Oh, and DEC Unix is ok from what I hear, but again I have no personal experience with it.
    We use SGI hardware, Sun hardware, IBM hardware, and we used to have HP hardware. For the three first ones we can live with the vendor OS (IRIX is particularly ok IMO), but no way we could go with HP-UX. If Linux ran on HP two or three years ago (no technical reason it couldn't have) we would still have the HP boxes in-house. We can survive with AIX on IBM workstations, but it's a lot of pain and you can stand the pain only so long.
    - TA
  • Yawn. Go run HURD. When you can manage to use slashdot from HURD, then come on back.

    I didn't say there was anything wrong with the Linux kernel or that people shouldn't use it. However, they should use the proper terminology. Nobody says "I run the Win32 Operating System," so neither should theys ay "I run the Linux Operating System." The Linux kernel is just the final component of the GNU OS, an Operating System years in the making.
  • That statement from HP that Linux was not up to the
    quality of HP-UX is so crazy that I don't know if
    I should cry or laugh.. we bought a bunch of HP
    work stations because they looked cheap at first sight.
    In the end we threw them all out and good riddance.
    What a crappy OS! Full of bugs, and all the HP-VUE
    X applications were statically linked so we had to buy
    a lot of extra RAM to make the boxes usable. That killed
    the price advantage.. Ok it may be that HP-UX can
    run 8-CPU better, but other than that HP-UX is in the league of Ultrix: Total crap.
  • We must have had really different experiences. I've worked a lot with SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX and Linux at work, and HP-UX is by far the worst of the lot.
    I'm glad to see HP get on the bandwagon, though. They've been pushing NT in all sorts of inappropriate places, and that's hurt their credibility in the last 2 places I've been. Maybe they'll get out of bed with MS, get rid of HP's CEO Lew Platt before he kills the company, and return to growth and profitability.
  • That's what I meant.. and that's how SGIs come these days. Ok it's /usr/people not /home, but other than that all those directories are in one big partition (and SGI *does* have a growable file system just like IBM). And yeah, it works *much* better than it used to do in the past, when they came with the tiny root partition which always ran full at the most inconvenient time. I remember Sun hell back in the past when we only had Sun boxes and they all had tiny root partitions. The reasoning was that it was "less chance of destroying something important if you don't keep your files (eggs) in the same partition (basket)", but that's in my opinion bogus. The other argument I hear is that with /usr/people on the same partition as / then a user can fill up the "root" disk and you have a DoS attack when root can't even log in to fix it.. wrong again, only root can fill up the last few percents of the disk (it's like that in Linux too).
    Now, there are some exceptions of course. Solaris uses a special file system type for /tmp (swap filesystem), so it's separate from the rest. That's fine. And if I set up a CVS server on a (non-Solaris) box, then I would also make /tmp a separate filesystem, a really big super-fast one, because CVS servers first copy everything into /tmp before sending it over the net to client. But for ordinary workstations and standard servers I say "make the disk one big partition and put / and /usr and /tmp and even /home on it and be done with it". No need to juggle the space between file systems, with one partition you have the ultimate dynamic system.. no more "I need 200 MB for this temporary file, and I have 150 MB free on / and 170 MB free on /usr but I can't find 200 MB in one place". Make another partition/filesystem when you get another disk, heck, add the disks together with md or another logical volume manager and make one even bigger filesystem of those disks :-)
    TA
  • Use Ghostscript, they have support for most HP printers that can't use Postscript.

    The printer manual also has driver alternatives you can use. I use the CDJ550 driver for my CDJ670.

    ---

  • Well I don't know about AIX, but I do know that, on HP's (well Veritas' on HP-UX, actually) implementation of LVM, you have lvreduce and vgreduce.

    Perhaps this is the point you were making?




  • The word "binary" never appears in the article and it clearly states that HP intends to use the Open Source development model. It said that PA-RISC development was being done by the Puffin group, so I'm really confused by your "only binaries" comment.

    Of course Red Hat is going to be the first choice for a US company. Red Hat has significant name recognition and they've been scrambling to get 24x7 support in place (that's what they are doing with the money from Intel and Netscape). The article also pointed out that HP was going to use Linux distributors for there support. About the only other choice today in the US for 24x7 is Caldera. Finally, HP said that their agreement with Red Hat is not exclusive. Until LinuxCare and similar multi-distribution support centers get ramped up, companies are going to go with the big distributions in their region (Red Hat in the US, SuSE in Europe and Pacific High Tech in Asia). Hopefully will get large companies to recognize Debian in the future, right now there isn't an accepted 24x7 solution for it.

    Sheesh, mention Red Hat and people freak out...

  • Posted by Buffy the Overflow Slayer:

    If they really want to support Linux, one of the
    best things they could do is write Linux drivers
    for their "windows" printers.

    -Buffy
  • To quote the article:
    Some critics of Linux in the enterprise have cited its wide open development community as a major deterrent to adoption. Too many versions of the OS and too many application development efforts lead to chaos that commercial vendors don't experience when developing in-house or with licensed ISVs, critics argue.

    Is it me or does that arguement not make sense. In my work environment, there are Windows for Workgroups 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. All of these are similar, but I do know that there are certainly compatibility issues.

    At least with the open development in Linux, you can fix the changes yourself to make everything work the way you want to. Plus, everything is based on unix, so the administration stays the same. With all these differences in Windows versions, that's not necessarily true.

    I believe the quote above is misleading and completely ignores the point of open source.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
  • Have I missed out on something, or am I not the only one who has never heard of these guys before? Fill me in...
  • Uh oh... [zdnet.com]
  • From what I understand these "Windows" printers hook into some Win95 code... It is up to M$ to release the specs.
    .
  • "Next time you guys invest alot of money in HP hardware and decide to
    throw it out, let me know which dumpster you use. My email address is
    zachary@acm.org."
    Naah, next time we'll run Linux on them instead and get some mileage out of the hardware.
    IMO HP should have dumped HP-UX a long time ago and gone Linux instead. Then we would probably still use HP around here.
    -TA
  • I have used Linux for nearly seven years, and AIX for only two, but
    "If Linux has reached a level where it is relatively equal to AIX in
    relaibilty and functionality[...]"
    all those two years it has never been a question of Linux reaching the reliability level of AIX.. Linux is way more reliable. It's another division completely. About functionality, the only thing I can think of is the growable file system in AIX, and as I've said before that's really an external feature not a characteristic of the operating system. I grow those JFS filesystems all the time, but face it people, as long as it isn't possible to *reduce* filesystems it's simply a glorified way of putting off the decision about how big you want to make the filesystem in the first place. An AIX box comes preinstalled with a whole bunch of tiny tiny filesystems (/tmp,/usr,/var,/home,/man,/ and so on), and the first thing you have to do is to increase them before they hit you straight in the face. It *always* fails because IBM won't sell a useless config..? Then you can start pointing out to people that IBM systems come with a completely useless setup (not only the partitions, everything else is crazy too..
    process limits, login limits, swap space, basically *everything* is preconfigured to give you and your users a headache).
    And in the end it's so much better to just make a big partition and be done with it (SGI come preconfigured this way now, and that's how I do my Linux setups too. No separate /tmp sillyness. Never regretted that.) In this way you avoid the decisions about how much to give to this filesystem and how much to give to that filesystem.
    But come back when you can *reduce* the filesystems.. then it may be more of an advantage.
    TA
  • HP is helping with the open source project, it isn't Red Hat related. Have a look at The PARISC Linux WWW page [thepuffingroup.com].
  • I hope they -do- port this to linux...and I also hope they don't completely screw it up like they did when they ported it to windows.

    Then again...I suppose porting ANY unix app to windows involves totally screwing it up....

    *bah*...'extend and embrace,' my arse....

  • Umm, what exactly is that? As far as I know, no Operating System exists with a name of "Linux." There's a kernel with such a name, but it's not any more of an Operating System than Mach or HURD are. Perhaps you're confusing it with the GNU Operating System, commonly used in conjunction with the Linux kernel (since the real GNU kernel, HURD, is not yet finished, most people replace that portion of the GNU OS with the Linux kernel).
  • I have had to explain to the reseller I just bought five HP Vectra P-II-450 systems from all about Linux, and that I didn't want Windows 98, NT, or anything else at all on them. The irritating this was that they wouldn't ship the PC's to me at the time, because they were out of stock of Windows 98 CD's. Trying to explain that I didn't want a windows 98 CD led to some heated phone calls. I normally build my own systems, but I needed a brand name manufacturer so that they can be supported at their eventual destination without me having to go all the way over there (Hong kong) from the UK just to plug some board or other back in.... I might as well try and herd cats.
    Now my reseller is telling me that the hardware isn't supported without the preinstalled software... Aaaarrgghh!
    Shameless company website plug [prosig.co.uk]

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