Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?

[Jerry Kemp]

On 06/15/16 10:08 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 14 June 2016 at 18:31, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:

> In Ireland, "gear" means hard drugs, so maybe it's safer!
>
>>> Tempted to try Shoebill... [...] but emulators aren't the same.
>>
>> I like emulators for "helping" with real hardware. Ie.. making disks or
>> disk images, transferring files, etc.. However, I'm with you, emulators
>> aren't as fun. They are awesome tools, and they are *some* fun, just not
>> as much as the real thing for me.
>


I'm not arguing your stance.  Real hardware is the best.  That said, after you 
have ran out of room due to too many other systems, I would rather have the 
opportunity to experience A/UX, or Rhapsody or even AIX 1.3x via virtualization 
or emulation, than to have totally missed the experience.





>
>>> It's a nice OS, I like and appreciate the NeXTstep heritage, but it's
>>> not a _proper_ Mac.

At this point, ver 10.11 and/or 10.12 beta, do you really see much, if any of 
that NeXT heritage?  It was very obvious in earlier versions of OS X with 
netinfo and other goodies, then thing slowly began to slip away after 10.4.   I 
see it as an OS with a Mach/XNU kernel, BSD userland and Apple's GUI slapped on 
top.  Used to be called Aqua, not sure what the current term is.


>>
>> I can't really back up that position, but I totally agree. Not that I have
>> anything "against" OSX. It at least doesn't have an identity-complex that
>> Linux does.

identity-complex is an interesting term for linux.  As I watched linux move up 
and grow, and these comments are reflective of my observations from probably 10+ 
years back, my primary though is that they aren't doing anything new, they 
aren't bringing anything new to the table.  They are just re-inventing the wheel 
(standard Unix software) under the GNU umbrella.


>
>> Linux+systemd desperately wants to be Windows nowadays
>

Its obvious that the systemd thing is a very controversial one, but I see the 
move as just one of the "trying to keep up with the other players in the field, 
i.e. launchd in OS X or svc services in Solaris/Solaris distro's.

I find it funny people are fighting for the Sys V rc scripts.   I remember how 
much they were hated when Sun rolled out Solaris 2.x and everyone wanted the BSD 
rc/rc.local/rc.xxxxx scripts back, because the Sys V system was too complicated.



>
>> but adherents still get offended when UNIX purists frown at their
>> "unification" efforts (ala systemd and others) which de-emphasize KISS,
>> small-is-beautiful, make everything a filter, etc...

With the exception of stuff like systemd, many times the old utilities are still 
there, or are easily acquired.  Its just that many, especially new system admins 
are only aware of new ways, and either don't know, don't have anyone to show 
them or just don't care about the options available to them.


>
> Kinda. But only kinda. The original goals of simplicity, consistency
> etc. were lost -- no, thrown away -- *decades* ago. Unix is almost the
> definitions of big, complex, arcane, and scary these days.


Especially for a system admin, at any level, getting started up is a scary 
proposition with a steep learning curve.   I'm certain that many here have 
frequently seen this tagline in the past.


"unix is user friendly, its just picky on who its friends are"



OTOH, it finally took Apple to come along with their GUI, which resulted in this 
popular tag line.



"It was easier to make Unix user friendly, then it was to fix ms windows"



>
>
>>   Linux wants to cop
>> that cool, without any binding respect towards the UNIX philosophy.
>
> No, I disagree. It's moving on. It's abandoning some of the legacy
> stuff, but there are loads of other OSes that are keeping it.


One of the things that keeps me a big fan of Solaris and different Solaris 
distro's, is that from a command line, depending how you set up your path, you 
have Sys V commands, BSD commands, linux/GNU commands, POSIX commands, etc.

 From the command line, you can pretty much set the OS up to behave however you 
choose, based on your shell and PATH env variables.

If you are running strictly on linux, for the most part, GNU userland is pretty 
much all you got.  I know the fine people at SCO open sourced the vi license, 
and there are some other things also out there where you can grab source code 
and compile Sys V binaries for linux.


>
>> and BSD is better on servers.
>
> *Ridiculously* contentious. I'm seeing and hearing of little _real_
> adoption. Some posturing, yes, but Linux's breadth of driver support,
> apps, functionality, automation, pretty much everything, means it's
> the dominant server platform of the WWW.


This is always a difficult topic to discuss and keep a level head.  The best OS 
for your server is the one that is stable, does a great job of running your 
mission critical applications and that there are people on staff trained to 
support it.

A lack of any of those 3 items can be disastrous.


>
>> That's one thing I liked about IRIX. It's still a true UNIX variant, not
>> "based on UNIX". The GUI is old-looking and primitive by today's
>> standards, but still I think they struck a nice balance or at least one
>> that appeals to me, personally.
>
> It's dead, though, isn't it?


I did a few years of system admin work supporting IRIX.  Initially, these boxes 
were in house because of graphics apps that ran on them and also oil & gas apps 
that ran on them.

In 2010, I transitioned jobs to a LARGE telco, and I worked as a system admin on 
the email team.  Millions of email customers.  At the time, they loved, but were 
transitioning off of IRIX systems, as the SGI that we knew and sometimes loved, 
was for all practical purposes gone.  From there, they moved to linux based x86 
systems which didn't scale well, then finally to Solaris on SPARC.

IRIX, in and of itself, was a good, but pretty generic Sys V Unix.  It had great 
hardware and also a lot of great apps written for it, in its day.  One of the 
other great things about it was the XFS file system.  I guest I just never 
thought that much about it, at least at the time, but XFS was ported to linux.

If you are on, or care to head over to the Dovecot (IMAP server mailing list), 
there are many great discussions and debates on the benefits of XFS on linux for 
high traffic Dovecot IMAP servers.

That said, responding to your GUI comment, the GUI isn't the operating system.
If you have the hardware and the 'hankering, you can download, compile and run 
CDE, OpenLook, Gnome, XCFE or any X11 window manager you care to take the time 
to run.





>>
>> I too used Linux from 1993 to about 1997. Then, the more I learned about
>> BSD, the more I liked it. Hordes were flooding in to use Linux by then, so
>> I bailed out.  I haven't really run Linux as a workstation since then. I'm
>> a current RHCE and I still interact with Linux a ton at my job, but there
>> is little joy in it. I find myself pursing my lips and shaking my head a
>> lot while fixing systemd problems or working on some dirty PoS of a JBOSS
>> server. It was a nice well when it was first dug, but now it's fouled by
>> too many people and too much toxic admixture.


I'm a big *BSD fan myself.  There is a lot of great work that get accomplished 
under the *BSD umbrella, that never seems to get proper attention.