Re: tlug: Re: Many Faces on Linux

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote,

> >>>>> "ash" == Andrew S Howell <andy@example.com> writes:
> 
>     ash> Though linux is very good, the one thing that I wish the
>     ash> linux community would do is not be so linux centric. That is,
> 
> Don't we all.
> 
>     ash> I would like to be able to run some open source stuff on
>     ash> commercial UNIX systems. As I write this, I can't think of a
> 
> Emacs, Ghostscript, gcc, Perl, python, Apache, X11, TeX, uhmmm, what's
> the problem?
> 
> Yeah, there's lots of neat stuff written for Linux that doesn't port.
> What's amazing is not that it doesn't port to Solaris, what's amazing
> is that even with hardware dependencies, typically you can run it on
> any CPU that Linux supports as long as the hardware needed is either
> PCI or SCSI.  Wasn't so long ago that half the stuff written for DOS
> you had to have a GUS for sound and a Mach32 (no Mach8s or Mach64s,
> definitely no Neomagic need apply....) or it fried your CD-ROM as it
> took the system down, and certainly didn't work.
> 
> Glass is half-full, IMHO.
> 
> True, Linux isn't yet generating a lot of port-able stuff.  But I
> think we'll see it happening as the momentum shifts from the FSF
> "we do FreeSoft right" crowd to the "oh, gomen ne, it never occured to 
> me you might want to run this on *BSD" crowd.
> 
>     ash> good example, but I know in the past I have found stuff that
>     ash> is so full of "linuxisms", that it is difficult to port.
> 
> cthugha is one, I still haven't figured out how to get it to talk to
> NAS ;-)  Enlightenment is another, more important example.  Or maybe it
> was windowmaker.

The fact that some Linux softo doesn't run on commercial
Unixes is not so much a problem generated by the Linux
people, I think, than a problem generated by the people who
use and produce the commercial Unixes.  In the end, people
having the necessary hardware and OS have to do the port.
So, if there is, say, no Solaris port for some software, you
should blame the Solaris users (or Sun) who didn't try hard
enough to port it, I think.  A second problem is, of course,
that if the software needs some support from the kernel (eg,
/proc file system), then, on Linux, the adept hacker can add
the required support to the kernel and contribute the
result.  On Solaris etc you are stuck, as you don't have the
source.  But you can't expect the developer on Linux to make 
his or her life more difficult by ignoring the features that 
are specific to Linux.

Before switching to Linux, I used SunOS (old one and
Solaris) for many years and usually, it was easy to install
free software, because apparently most people writing this
kind of software used Suns.  It seems that the situation
changed and Linux is the number one platform for developers.
Maybe not very surprising, but interesting and clearly
entails this software becomes easiest to install and use on
Linux.

Cheers,

Manuel

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