UNIX V7

2009/6/11 Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com>: As a friend commented on my LJ: "OpenSolaris is very much 1990s Unix being dragged kicking and screaming into the present. Solaris 10 more or less managed this at the command line, OpenSolaris is trying it for the desktop. "Summary: if you're not a Solaris admin or programmer for a living, you probably don't or shouldn't care. If you are, you'll love that bug reports get comments from the programmers responsible explaining why things are the way they are (e.g. why there's no kernel support for SMB mounting)." The Mac's at about 4-5% now, I believe. So a good 4x the penetration of /desktop/ Linux. But Linux has very wide penetration in servers and in embedded roles, which are very hard to count. I suspect the Mac is still ahead on sheer numbers, though, if we're talking interactive users. It's possible that millions of ADSL routers running Linux - or cellphones and what-have-you - might put Linux in the lead, but then, if you count them, every iPhone is running OS X... Indeed, and Zeta for some years after that. If it hadn't done, it wouldn't exist in any form today. Ha! Amiga don't. Amiga Inc. - the new name of KAOS Inc. after the original Amiga Inc., spun off from Commodre, went broke - don't have anything to do with AmigaOS 4.x. Amiga Inc. the 2nd licensed AmigaOS to Hyperion in Germany, who developed OS 4.0 for PowerPC, but they've fallen out & Hyperion have gone it alone to finish it, launch it and now put out v4.1. But there's no new PowerPC hardware to run it. Efforts are afoot to port it to Genesi's Efika, which infuriates Amiga Inc. II as Genesi are a rival. It's insanely incestuous and back-stabbing. As is the Acorn RISC OS world today. In a shrinking pond, the little fish turn to fighting... But yes, if the "real" AmigaOS were to have a hope, it should run on x86. x86-64, ideally: new, clean, not register-starved, and no legacy baggage of 32-bit drivers etc. Won't happen, though. AROS, in the meantime, is slowly but steadily making progress. I believe it now has native USB & Ethernet + TCP/IP stacks and a decent modern bundled web-browser. It's not really "there" yet (unless you're an Amiga user and are not accustomed to having all mod cons), but it's close. Haiku too is getting there. It recently reached 2 milestones: the 1st, the more significant, it became self-hosting; the 2nd, they got it building and running with the current GCC. The snag is, build it with GCC 3 or 4, it works fine, but it's not binary-compatible with BeOS 5. Build it with GCC 2.whatever, it's binary compatible, but you're stuck with a legacy toolchain. I believe they're working on a compatibility sandbox or VM sort of thing, to keep the compatibility with BeOS r5 and Zeta apps, while allowing them to move forward with current dev tools. I've only played with both briefly, inside VMs. For my money, BeOS^H^H^H^H, I mean, Haiku is more modern and forward-looking, but AROS is probably marginally more "mature". But then, Haiku has some apps, at least, whereas AROS' apps must run under emulation. Currently, in the Amiga world, there are 3 threads of development: - AROS, primarily on x86 but with a PowerPC build, Free and open source; - MorphOS, from Genesi - semi-open-source in bits, 2 versions - one old one for classic Amigas with PowerPC boards, one for new Genesi PowerPC kit - AmigaOS 4.x, from Hyperion, strictly only for the tiny handful of PowerPC Amigas from 5-10y ago. Frankly, I reckon only AROS has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving. I'd like to see MorphOS open-sourced so the best of it can be incorporated into AROS, if that is at all technically viable. Meanwhile, if Haiku keeps it together, in a few years' time, it has the potential to be a really fast, smooth, POSIX-compatible GUI desktop OS that could stomp all over desktop Linux in performance. But probably, something like Google Android will get there first, sadly. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508