30 Jan
2003
30 Jan
'03
8:44 p.m.
I'm intrigued by the availability of AS/400
machines ; the prices are
within grasp of the typical mainframe/minicomputer enthusiast.
[...]
What are the licensing methods available for OS/400?
I'd really love to
get a PPC AS/400 and run Linux under control of OS/400 using the
partitioning scheme.
That only works on the RISC-based AS/400 and iSeries machine, and I'm
not sure that it will work on the earlier models of those.
Linux definitely will NOT run on the older CISC-based AS/400 machines,
which are the ones that can be found cheap. The CISC architecture
was actually poorly suited to Linux, but worse yet there was no customer
documentation on it. The supported programming layer for the AS/400
was ILMI, and the AS/400 uses a combination of binary translation and
interpretation to run ILMI code on either the CISC or RISC boxes.
But on the newer RISC boxes, they now allow running other PowerPC native
software (such as Linux) in a partition. That wasn't avaliable on
CISC machines, and possibly not on the early RISC machines.
Last I checked, pricing on a new low-end AS/400 was around $7000. I'm
not sure about the current situation.