The UPS man rang my buzzer. I sat in my chair sweating bullets. Do I even dare? Despite better judgment, I buzzed him in. “Did anyone see you?” I asked in a nervous voice. “Uh, just sign here.” He gave me an annoyed look and after getting my John Hancock, he handed me the package. I hurriedly closed my blinds, fearful someone might see the contents as I opened it. The package sat on my coffee table for about an hour while we (that is to say, me and the package) stared each other down. A scene from the cult classic Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits came to mind: “Mum! Dad! Don’t touch it! It’s pure evil!“
While I doubt the package contained pure evil (in fact, I was pretty sure it contained some install CDs and perhaps some manuals), I’m sure many of my friends as well as tens of thousands of others in the open source community would conclude otherwise.
For you see, the package was from SCO. Dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn.
The purpose of that lame little melodrama was to illustrate the rather unique context of this operating system review. I want to be as objective as possible, but I’d be a fool to think such a review could possibly avoid the controversy and raw emotions surrounding the company offering the product I’ve chosen to evaluate.
The SCO Group has earned their now nefarious reputation of pure evil from the open source community and others for their recent legal tactics. However, separate from the legal arguments and the drama of the battle of the open letters, SCO does actually sell a product (beyond “licenses” for Linux).
Actually, they have a pair of Unix offerings: UnixWare and OpenServer. SCO recently announced they’d sold licenses to these products to a number of companies, including McDonald’s and Warner Brothers. Not having used either, and giving the mounting controversy, I decided to take a look at what SCO considers their premier Unix offering, UnixWare 7.1.3. Drama aside, UnixWare is an operating system that people do use, so I figured it’s worth a look and arranged to do an evaluation.
The Test System
The system I used to test is definitely not top of the line, but it is indicative of the type of hardware currently still commonly used in a server environment. It’s also the only system I currently have available to perform such evaluations.
Vendor: VA Linux
Processor: (2) Intel Pentium IIIs at 600 MHz, 256 KB cache
Motherboard: Intel L440GX+
RAM: 512 MB PC133 ECC
DISK: (1) 9 GB Maxtor SCSI LVD 10,000 RPM
SCSI Controller: Adaptec AIC-7896 Dual Channel
Video: Cirrus Logic GD 5480 2 MB RAM
Installation
Installation was fairly straightforward. It’s a text-based installation, and while not as fancy as the newer graphical-based installations, it was still fully functional. UnixWare had no problem recognizing any of my hardware, and installed the drivers automatically.
The only real difference from most installations, including a recent Solaris installation I performed, was the prompting for a license key. If you lack a license key, you can defer entering one in favor of an evaluation license which is good for 60 days. I didn’t have a license key, so I opted for the evaluation license. It took about 20 minutes to get the first CD loaded, and then prompted me for a reboot.
After the system rebooted, the installation continues by asking to insert each CD (there were 5), and prompting for which packages on the CDs I’d like to install. This was very different than the usual “pick what packages you want to install, and I’ll figure out which CDs you need” method more commonly used by installers. This was much more time consuming, and it required a much higher level of interaction.
The packages on these install CDs had their own very unique install scripts, and there were additional license keys required for several of the portions, including the NeTraverse Merge, ReliantHA Host Monitoring Software, and others. It seemed a bit disjointed and patched-together.
You can defer going through the other CDs which is what I’d recommend as it saves quite a bit of time. UnixWare and most of what you need comes on the first disk and installs in about 20 minutes. You can go back and install the other packages later if necessary.
Despite using a dual-processor system, SMP support is a licensed feature, so this installation only recognized one of the two processors.
Using UnixWare
Logging on the first time, I found a pretty bare-bones system. For instance, neither of the shells tcsh or bash were installed (which was annoying as I can’t imagine using a system without one of the two). Also installed is a built-in UnixWare (non-GCC) C compiler, but not a C++ compiler (see the compiling section for more on this).
One of the oddities I found while using this system was the tar utility. UnixWare’s version of tar is very garrulous, and will throw warnings all over the place.
x tcsh-6.12.00/win32/stdio.c, 15774 bytes, 31 tape blocks UX:tar: WARNING: Cannot get passwd information for christos UX:tar: WARNING: tcsh-6.12.00/win32/stdio.c: owner not changed
It’ll send warnings on just about everything, which can be very frustrating if you’re trying to follow along with what files are actually being unpacked. You can of course suppress these warnings, but that means using a different syntax than you’re probably used to. Installing GNU’s tar, which of course does not suffer that malady, is probably a better solution.
The overall feel greatly resembles Solaris, owing of course to their common System V heritage. The package management system is very familiar, and includes the familiar commands pkgadd, pkgrm, and pkginfo, although the syntax is a bit different. On Solaris, I’d typically do pkgadd –d . or pkgadd –d packagefile.pkg to install a package. In UnixWare, that particular syntax does not work, so to add a package file you’d run cat packagefile.pkg | pkgadd -d –.
When checking out the file system, I was surprised to learn UnixWare includes a version of the venerable Veritas File System (vxfs). You can use the old stalwart UFS, but there are several advantages to using vxfs, primarily speed and fscking issues.
The history of UnixWare is a bit confusing. (Take a look at this site for a more detailed chronicle of UnixWare’s history, as well as the history of Unix in general.) UnixWare jumped from version 2.1.2 to version 7 in 1998. Then, in 2001, the new release of UnixWare 7 suddenly became Open UNIX 8 (7.1.2?). In 2002, Open UNIX 8 was updated as UnixWare 7.1.3.
One side effect of this constant name changing is that it sometimes confuses build scripts when compiling software (as it did with tcsh).
CDE Desktop
The login screen, again familiar if you’re used to Solaris, offers either a CDE, KDE (Linux-based), or OKP login environment. (OKP is the OpenServer Kernel Personality). The CDE desktop is fairly Spartan, with no fancy anti-aliased fonts and a color scheme that makes Solaris’s CDE desktop look like Mac OS X, but it’s fully functional.
Aside from the bland CDE layout, the graphical SCO administration application was impressive, and it included the ability to choose not only the screen resolution, but the refresh rate (something missing in most Linux installs, and Solaris). It’s a full featured graphical administration program, allowing one to administer mail, file systems, process priorities, and more all from a graphical menu.
One oddity of the UnixWare X11 install is that it’s X11R5, not X11R6. I didn’t compile any X11 applications, so I wonder what kind of problems this might present. The Linux emulation environment sports an X11R6 installation.
Software Availability
Software availability is certainly not one of UnixWare’s more attractive areas. As far as modern enterprise applications go, there’s just not a lot available. Sun’s Java is only current through 1.3. Oracle hasn’t released a UnixWare port for a while, and are not planning on doing any future releases. UnixWare just doesn’t seem to be on the radar for enterprise application developers.
The solution, for the most part, is to run applications (such as Oracle) on UnixWare’s Linux Kernel Personality (LKP), its Linux emulation environment (discussed later in this review). I could see this making sense in situations where most of the software is running UnixWare natively, with a few applications required that only run Linux running in the LKP. But I can’t see it making any sense to run the UnixWare operating system and having all the applications running in the LKP.
SCO has a “skunkware” download site, which includes pre-compiled UnixWare binary versions of open source applications such as Apache and GCC. Some of the pre-compiled binaries are old, and I wouldn’t recommend running them (for instance, Apache 1.3.26 and PHP-4.1.2 are the most recent on the site, while Apache 1.3.29 and PHP 4.3.4 are out now). If you do use one of these pre-compiled, make sure it’s a version that doesn’t include known security vulnerability.
Compiling Software
Compiling software was probably the most frustrating part of this review. To sum it up, it’s a major hassle to get many applications compiled, and some I couldn’t get compiled at all. This is important, given the lack of what’s available for the UnixWare platform on a pre-compiled and enterprise level, you’re going to need to do a lot of compiling. If you run UnixWare, you’re going to need to know your way around a Makefile, and an overall higher level of compiling savvy than you would on other systems.
As I said before, the basic UnixWare installation includes a (non GCC) C compiler, but does not include a C++ compiler. That’s something to keep in mind, as many applications, such as MySQL, have C++ code, so you’ll need some type of C++ compiler in order to compile them. SCO does offer a C++ compiler as part of the UnixWare Development Kit, which lists for $599. I didn’t have an evaluation license (or the $600) so I decided to use a pre-compiled GCC 2.95.2 from the skunkware site to compile applications that required a C++ compiler.
For the first application to compile under UnixWare, I chose tcsh. For just the virtue of the greater productivity it affords me, I consider tcsh (or bash) a necessity, so I downloaded the source from a site listed on tcsh.org. (I tried using the tcsh versions posted on SCO’s skunkware site, but they all exhibited a strange up-arrow last-command problem, to the point of being unusable.)
It took me a bit to get it to compile. The ./configure script failed to discover what kind of OS it is (which happens with a few other auto-configure scripts).
./configure loading cache ./config.cache checking host system type... i686-unknown-sysv5UnixWare7.1.3 checking cached host tuple... ok configure: error: Tcsh can't guess the configuration file name for 'i686-unknown-sysv5UnixWare7.1.3' systems. Check tcsh's 'Ported' file for manual configuration instructions.
After experimenting with a few of the config.h files and adjusting Makefile, I was able to get tcsh to compile, and it did not exhibit the strange behavior of the skunkware tcsh.
I was able to compile Apache, OpenSSL 0.9.7c, OpenSSH 3.7.1p2, and a few others without much trouble. For the most part I was able to get them to compile with both the built-in C compiler, and the GCC 2.95.2 package I got from the skunkware site.
However, I could not get mysql-4.0.16 to compile at all with GCC despite hours of trying. I also could not get any version of GCC 3 to compile with either the older GCC or the built-in C compiler. (While the GCC team has contemplated doing so, they haven’t yet removed support for SCO products).
Linux LKP
The Linux Kernel Personality (Linux LKP) was to me the most impressive of UnixWare’s capabilities. The LKP is a separate environment under UnixWare running a version of what looks like Caldera’s OpenLinux, and allows UnixWare to run Linux compiled binaries unmodified.
Effectively, the LKP is like running Linux in a separate VMWare-style environment. It runs as a kernel module (there doesn’t seem to be an actual Linux Kernel running, rather the module accepts Linux system calls), and shares space on the root file system. Even to uname it looks like a Linux system:
# uname -a
Linux sco1.vegan.net 2.4.13 #1 Thu Oct 31 02:32:23 EST 2002 i686 unknown
The Linux file system is accessible to UnixWare via a /linux mount. To interact with the Linux image, all you need to do is type in “linux”, or run one of the Linux shells from UnixWare, such as /linux/bin/tcsh. The LKP is chroot’ed to the /linux file system, and the UnixWare file system is available to the LKP environment by a /unixware mount.
The Linux kernel version number piqued my interest, because of the recent kernel vulnerability responsible for the compromise of some Debian project servers. I’m not sure if the same kernel exploit would work in the LKP, but it’d be an interesting test.
The LKP works so well that the KDE environment runs entirely from this realm (CDE runs native to UnixWare). The KDE/Linux desktop seemed significantly slower than the CDE counterpart, so much so that entering text in a window often took a second or two to echo back, although that could easily have more to do with my poor Cirrus 2MB video card than slowness in the emulation. However, the CDE UnixWare-native version was fairly snappy and responsive. Unfortunately, I did not have a faster video card to test with the system.
Earlier I mentioned have problems compiling software under UnixWare. Oddly enough, this was not the case in the LKP. I was able to compile Apache 1.3.29, MySQL 4.0.16, GCC 3.3.2, OpenSSH 3.7.1p2, OpenSSL 0.9.7c, and a number of other applications without any trouble or mucking around in the Makefile.
I ran some tests to see if the LKP imposed any performance penalty as opposed to running natively in UnixWare, and the results were pretty surprising.
To test, I used OpenSSL 0.9.7c’s openssl speed function, invoking the command with openssl speed rsa dsa. To compile, I used the built-in C compiler for the UnixWare version and GCC 2.95.2 for the LKP version.
The results for both were virtually identical. For this test at least, there was no apparent performance penalty for running applications in the LKP versus natively.
Also included with UnixWare is the OKP (OpenServer Kernel Personality). OpenServer is SCO’s other Unix product, and UnixWare offers an environment similar to the LKP to run OpenServer-native binaries unmodified. Not being familiar with OpenServer, I didn’t evaluate that environment.
Security
To evaluate security, I took a look at how well SCO handles security bulletins and issues fixes. SCO has two different patch/update methods: The maintenance pack, and the update pack. The current as of writing for both is update pack 3 and maintenance pack 3, and they both contain security fixes, bug fixes, and functionality updates. Maintenance packs are freely available, where as update packs require a subscription license. Update packs include everything that you’d get in a maintenance pack, and more.
Not having a license for the update packs, I wasn’t able to fully evaluate SCO’s adeptness at security. Looking at SCO’s published security updates, they seem to have caught a number of the more current bugs, including the recent sendmail exploit as well as potential OpenSSH vulnerabilities. UnixWare came installed with OpenSSH version 3.4p1, and the maintenance pack 3 I installed did not include the most recent version, OpenSSH 3.7.1p2. That version appears to be included in update pack 3, but again I can’t confirm since I’ve been unable to apply it. Maintenance pack 3 did include a fixed version of sendmail.
Fortunately, despite trouble with other applications, I was able to compile current versions of OpenSSL (0.9.7c) and OpenSSH (3.7.1p2).
User Community
A user community is an invaluable resource to any operating system or application, whether they are commercial or open source, as they offer a certain measure of support that no vendor could possibly provide alone. These resources are typically realized with Google searches, Usenet posts, and message boards (just to name a few).
The ability to leverage this user base is usually directly related to the size of the user base, and that’s where UnixWare is lacking. In all of the issues I came up against when using UnixWare, I had trouble finding solutions online. This is not to say that there aren’t very talented people posting about technical issues and their solutions, there just aren’t that many of them.
Thus far in this evaluation I’ve avoided the “SCO factor”, but when speaking on issues beyond the purely technical, it’s impossible to ignore the animosity that SCO has generated with its legal actions and the ramifications that they create. It certainly can’t help adoption of UnixWare, and I think there’s a very compelling argument that it will significantly harm adoption. As a result, the limited user base could cause community-based involvement to suffer significantly, and user community is something that I at least consider very important from and admin perspective.
On a side note I have sympathy for UnixWare users, who now find themselves embattled for running an operating system whose vendor has now become nefarious. Many SCO users don’t agree with SCO’s tactics, but they do find themselves responsible for UnixWare systems, and can easily end up the target of derision. This is also true for SCO employees. I have to imagine that many (perhaps most) don’t agree with their employer’s new tactics. It’d do well to give SCO users and employees the benefit of the doubt.
Enter the Cost Matrix
Cost is always a consideration, and this is perhaps where UnixWare is the most disappointing. For a single-CPU system with one user, UnixWare is $799. For 5 users, the price goes up to $1,399. Here is the complete price list I got from SCO:
Edition | Max Users | Max Memory | Max CPUs | List Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Base Edition | 1-User | 1 GB | 1 | $799.00 |
Business Edition | 5-User | 4 GB | 1 | $1,399.00 |
Departmental Edition | 25-User | 4 GB | 2 | $2,299.00 |
Enterprise Edition | 50-User | 16 GB | 4 | $4,999.00 |
Data Center Edition | 150-User | 32 GB | 8 | $9,999.00 |
They were somewhat vague as to what constitutes a user. Here is their definition of a user, from their EULA, quoted to me from a SCO rep:
“User” is a person accessing the Software via a local or remote interactive device, such as a terminal or workstation, except where such use is exclusive to routing or gateway functions of the Software.
I’m inclined to think that it’s a similar model to Microsoft’s definition of a “user”. I can’t imagine it would consist of database users or simultaneous web users, as this would make this product virtually unusable as an Internet server. That is of course speculation, so contact SCO if you’ve any questions regarding their licensing policies.
In doing a comparison with other open source and commercial Unix and Unix-like operating systems, UnixWare is significantly more expensive. To illustrate this, I did a quick price comparison between UnixWare, Linux (both free and enterprise), Solaris x86, and FreeBSD. For the comparison, Enterprise Linux is defined as the distributions that come with some level of support (such as Red Hat Enterprise Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and the free Linux would include projects like Slackware and Fedora.
CPUs | UnixWare | Linux | Enterprise Linux | FreeBSD (and other BSDs) | Solaris 9 x86 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1-CPU | $799-$1,399 | Free | $349-$449 | Free | $99-$250 |
2-CPU | $2,299.00 | Free | $349-$449 | Free | $250.00 |
4-CPU | $4,999.00 | Free | $749-$1499 | Free | $1,500.00 |
8-CPU | $9,999.00 | Free | $749-$1499 | Free | (supposedly possible, but |
For the pricing I used listed prices from RedHat and SUSE (recently acquired by Novell) for their base packages. Obviously, support levels will differ from vendor to vendor as well as prices based on levels of support, so of course doing your own comparison based on your needs would be beneficial if you’re evaluating operating systems.
From this comparison, you can see that UnixWare is dramatically more. On top of that, extras like the UnixWare UDK (and the C++ compiler) and/or access to the UnixWare Update Packs can add significant cost.
UnixWare’s Future?
The future of UnixWare seems a bit murky. There’s something I noticed while searching through SCO’s press releases, or rather something I noticed was missing: Any announcement of 64-bit support for either Itanium 2 or AMD’s x86-64 platform. It doesn’t appear that 64-bit is on any publicized road map for UnixWare, while other operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, and Windows are either currently supporting or have announced impending support. To me, this is a major strike against UnixWare.
And as I’ve said before, the SCO litigation can’t help UnixWare’s adoption, and is probably in fact severely harming it. While not wanting to get into the FUD factor that SCO has been accused of, one wonders what all this could bode for the future of UnixWare.
The Good
The Linux emulation (LKP) works extremely well and I was not able to measure any performance hit from my tests. SCO administration is a good graphical system
administration application.
The Bad
There are very few enterprise applications available for UnixWare. Compiling applications is difficult, and requires a greater amount of compiling savvy than Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and others. The cost is extremely high compared to other free and commercial Unix-type operating systems, and given the limitations, doesn’t seem worth it. SCO’s legal maneuvers place a dark cloud over the future of UnixWare, and have created an angry backlash.
Conclusion
All in all, it’s hard to find a compelling value proposition in UnixWare, even without taking into account the animosity that SCO has generated. When you do consider the SCO issue, (as it is impossible to ignore) the UnixWare story is even less compelling. I can’t consider it a leading operating system, in terms of either technology or functionality, and I couldn’t imagine any situation where I’d recommend it as a solution.
While The LKP is indeed impressive, it would only make sense running UnixWare-native applications with a need to run a few Linux apps. Given that few commercial applications run natively in UnixWare while most run great in Linux, this doesn’t seem to a situation that would be very common.
Linux offers a far greater value and far better enterprise application support. In addition to Linux, FreeBSD and the other BSDs, and Linux offer a far better open source environment, better hardware support, and more features.
If you want to use a commercial Unix for x86 (and one not targeted by SCO – at least not yet), then Solaris x86 is a very strong offering, with far more enterprise applications available, is far less expensive, and leverages a much larger install base than UnixWare.
In short, the lack of commercial applications and user community, the difficulty with open source applications, the SCO litigation, and the high price are all marks against UnixWare. There are just very few reasons to adopt UnixWare as your platform, and plenty of reasons to adopt (or migrate to) other platforms.
Isn’t UnixWare a SCO product? Why would anyone touch it then? SCO is downright evil!
Yes, it is a SCO product, but on the same time it is an operating system. And OSAlert is about Operating systems (and not just OSes), but not politics and laywers.
Please keep the discussion here about the UnixWare product and not about the ethos of the SCO management or their lawsuits. These are off topic here. Keep your anger for SCO articles related to the lawsuit.
Very nice, objective and brave review Tony!
Destruction is always easier than construction.
I too believe that SCO is dead wrong. But I believe that a product review should also be kind of objective.
Like Eugenia said: OSAlert is about OS’es and Unixware is one of them…
SCO has never been a major unix player, they have been known as a unix for economy hardware for quite awhile. i dont know, i wouldnt want to install an os whose main claim to faim is its ability to run on mcdonalds cash registers on my server….
If we open this up to a discussion of why SCO sucks, then the discussion of the OS and the review will be drowned out. Let’s just assume for the sake of this forum that SCO is bad, very very bad, so don’t bother mentioning it.
Now that you have the cds maybe you can do a test of FreeBSD SCO compatibility and let us know the results. That would be an interesting follow up imho.
I’ve been running SCO Openserver as my server OS since 1996. The company I currently work for has been using it for years longer. I’ve got ADSL and a proxy server and a firewall to protect my internal LAN from the bad guys on the internet. I’ve never had an exploit. I use the SCO box for file serving to my internal LAN pc’s. I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s been rock solid and reliable. Likewise the company experience. Santa Cruz Organization (the original SCO) developed UnixWare as the upgrade path from Openserver. So I don’t doubt that it’s as enterprise ready as any other *nix out there. Even if Santa Cruz Organization was not a big player in the enterprise market, it still produced excellent, enterprise software. I will not, however, be upgrading to any products offered by the current company that calls itself SCO. When the time comes to replace my current server, I will be going either with Linux or OSX.
What makes no since to me is there pricing matrix. If they wish to grow there user base they should at least put the product in a competitive price bracket with similar products in the market. Also, with the need to license other software components, the product becomes even more unattractive from a business perspective.
My guess is that they price so high because they have a very small user base and they need to increase the per-unit pricing to make money off the product.
Back in 2000 I was tooling around getting Linux PPC installed on my old PowerComputing box. I ended up with a horrible mess requiring an exact mix of hard drives (I had three, but one was supposed to be optional) in order to boot.
Then I took a course in (SCO) Unix. SCO becase this was in SC (Santa Cruz, California) and they could get some of the nice people from SCO to teach classes for cheap.
My impressions mirror the reviewer’s on most points. It was pretty bad, and the drop rate of students and working installations was about equal (and high). Not something I wanted to use on a daily basis.
One thing did stick out to me: playing with a real Unix hammered home how horrible Linux’s disk management was. Linux was trying to give SCSI drives drive letters? Linux’s ties to cheap hardware still seems to be a downfall for it, just as Unix’s ties to expensive hardware are for it.
Sorry, not too many other thoughts (sorry), other than they were pretty impressed with their config prog.
I was quite intrigued by how this news begins… Very good! Very refreshing! Quite provoking. A good move. Not that I care about SCO, but this news item was not like all the rest. Good.
But I’ve long been curious about performance benchmarks, its long been my understanding that Linux (and most assuredly *BSD) has been spanking it for a while now. What kind of threading support does it have? Is it as poor as LinuxThreads or is it decently scalable? The LPK does seem rather impressive, and perhaps the only way you could run apps on it in the future. Which naturally begs the question, why run Linux apps on a tremendously expensive, backward, and potentially slow(er) o.s. when you can get the real deal? Oh, and I hadn’t yet figured out the different between UnixWare and OpenServer. As an aside my old job had an old SCO Unix box (do not recall if it was OpenServer or UnixWare) that ran the database (it was a small vocational school) and along with our Red Hat Linux box that handled email, firewall, proxy, and www serving it was the most stable box there. The Windows servers always demanded our attention for something, but never those two.
Very nice, intelligent, balanced review.
One point – I think you will find that most companies who are running UnixWare are doing so for some very industry specific vertical market applications and not for generic server roles like Samba or Apache or Oracle or things like that. I don’t know this for sure, but I think that it is very likely and would explain why Tony had so many problems just doing everyday common things with UnixWare that he could take for-granted with other Unices.
“Oh, and I hadn’t yet figured out the different between UnixWare and OpenServer.”
SCO OpenServer still uses System V kernel version 3.2 while
Unixware is on SVR5.
One thing did stick out to me: playing with a real Unix hammered home how horrible Linux’s disk management was. Linux was trying to give SCSI drives drive letters? Linux’s ties to cheap hardware still seems to be a downfall for it, just as Unix’s ties to expensive hardware are for it.
Maybe I haven’t had enough exprience with other flavors of *nix, however I’m not quite sure what u mean by this statement. I’ve used Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris, and all have a similar /dev/*** reference for harddrives. In linux’s case you would mount /dev/hda as / or /boot or whatever you decided. I don’t get where you say “drive letters”. Did you maybe use Suse and see that it mounted your windows drives as /windows/c or /windows/d? I just don’t get where your coming from.
Again, I could be completey wrong about something, but as far as I know in linux scsi drivers are listed as /dev/scd0, /dev/scd1, etc, and in other unixes you just replace the scd* w/ some other abreivation.
There is no reason to consider SCO UNIX evil. Before it changed management and became a company of lawyers, there were a lot of very good engineers at SCO. SCO UNIX is from that SCO, not the current one.
Not that I use any SCO product, or that I would consider it, but this really was a nice to read review. By the looks of it, SCO has a nice IP in its hands with its “Personality” stuff. If they could leverage this knowledge and experience for other *nix like OS’es they might actually have a viable product to compete in a market which is still wide open (virtual computing, compatibility layers). As it is now though, SCO seems to be more interrested in making money from litigation than from competing in an honest market.
Anyway, thumbs up for this review, keep up the good work.
PS. What worries me is that “Enterprise Linux” though cheaper than SCO’s licenses still is rather steep priced. Where did this come from all of a sudden? Does the little proprietary addon (read: installer) and more or less professional support really make up for the rather large price difference between free and $1500? Personally, I think not. It’s exploiting the work of the community which basically built these products. But alas, with open source also comes the freedom to choose. We’re fortunate for that. All we need now is a company like Oracle to also certify for a free linux distribution. Debian, of course, being the most viable candidate. Does anyone have any idea how to convince a company of that size to consider such an action?
I was able to get a COBOL app and runtime compiler running under FreeBSD 4.x, it was originally running on dozens of OpenServer 5.0.4 boxen. The app was for POS, so I had to change some of the settings for printer mapping, term settings were also modded. This got them outta of having to hassle with SCO licensing. Their corp IT “mothership” decided to revamp the whole thing to Windows, thus making it a learning experience more than anything else. I have ran UnixWare (test drive), and OpenServer (production). I no longer offer support for SCO products, and have not found any need to recommend UnixWare nor OpenServer. There are better solutions out there, imho.
-iGZo
re skaeight
The /dev/sda is what the original poster is refering to. Most “enterpise” (term used in contex) use /dev/controller id/ drive id construct. I think there is a way to do this in linux but I don’t remember right now. For the record the reason is large drive systems.
1 primary controller + 1 backup controller per drive box
3 drive boxes each with 800 GBi of storage
Veritas Raid 10
Lots of drives etc, the bus id and drive id is a lot easier to manage nd to trace disk io bottlenecks to specfic drive.
Donaldson
The LKP doesn’t work like VMware at all; rather, it’s much closer to the Linux binary compatibility in *BSD. Rather than providing a virtual machine, it simply supplies Linux binaries with a different system call table to the native one, so that the syscalls in the LKP are used. It’s entirely unsuprising that speed tests show no difference between LKP and native Unixware; nothing is virtualised or emulated. If there’s no syscalls being made (which for RSA generation, there won’t be many – it’s all calculation), then there’s no overhead; if there are syscalls being made, you’ll probably find the overhead is neglible.
A better speed comparison would be Linux 2.4.x vs Unixware’s LKP on the same hardware. Probably be interesting to compare it with the speed of FreeBSD doing the same.
Another speed test which could be worth doing is a relatively carefully crafted ‘grep’ on a dictionary file, or something similar. Lots of file I/O, so lots of syscalls.
Turn devfs on:
/dev/ide/hostN/busN/targetN/lunN/{disc,partN}
/dev/scsi/hostN/busN/targetN/lunN/{disc,partN}
Yep, very gutsy, Tony. Especially considering UnixWare doesn’t seem all that great and is apparently overpriced as well. It must be embarrassing for them to own Unix and be outdone by SGI, IBM and Sun.
A lot of what “Enterprise Linux” gives you isn’t so much code, but work done in the trenches.
When OpenSSH came out with vulnerabilities, if you were an Enterprise customer, you had access to a patched OpenSSH that you can download. Same with sendmail and the Kernel vulnerability.
Many people are fine with compiling their own versions, and that’s what I do. But for some companies it’s worth it to them to pay that sub
The great thing about Linux is that you have that choice. You can either DIY, or you can pay someone to do it for you, if that solution makes sense. And for some companies, having someone else do it makes sense.
“PS. What worries me is that “Enterprise Linux” though cheaper than SCO’s licenses still is rather steep priced. Where did this come from all of a sudden? Does the little proprietary addon (read: installer) and more or less professional support really make up for the rather large price difference between free and $1500? Personally, I think not. It’s exploiting the work of the community which basically built these products.”
If you take RHL Enterprise, I think all that is “licensed” is the artwork/name and that is tied to a support contract. I do wish they made this more clear in the EULA. So this means that if you wanted you could strip the artwork and do what you wanted as long as you didn’t call it Redhat.
Is the support worh it? I have no clue. It seems people have been screaming about “lack of support” for a while. This is support shoved down your throat, which I guess is what they wanted.
you also have to remember, unixware is a unix that has surived, there is a litany of those that havent (much to my disappointment, BSDI!). it WILL be the next commercial unix to die, but it has survived this long, if it was really bad, it would have died out long ago.
using unixware is like using an unpolished old version of solaris. if sun didnt put the work into solaris they have, youd get unixware.
it served its time well and should be retired.
I have found OpenServer to be a much better product then UnixWare was. I did a technical comparison for Groklaw and I found much of the lower level functions to be much like a UnitedLinux distribution. If you ordered the OS from SCO how come the author did not get a license key. I got one when I ordered the packages. Also why did the author go to the skunkware site, The Optional Services CD has alot of the extras that the author has brought up and they are more recent. I have personally had no problem with UnixWare and I still have it to play with, I have built MySQL, Postgre, KDE and other consumer apps for it. I wouldnt use it as my main OS nor deploy it as a primary server solution because Windows 2003 and SuSE Linux have a much broader application support, dont ask me about RHEL because I wouldnt touch Red Hat with a hundred foot pole, but overall I found UnixWare to be pretty much fully functional. OpenServer now on the other hand, the other SCO product, I would use that as a primary because OpenServer is much better than UnixWare and in terms of uptime and recovery has beaten Linux to the floor. What I want to know is this, Did the author order the evaluation or did he prompt for evaluation? Thats my question.
I have found OpenServer to be a much better product then UnixWare was.
Now that would have to be the epitomy of damning with faint praise…
(I’m grumpy because I’ve just started a new job with a bunch of OSR5 boxes and have thus far found it one of the most user-hostile unixes I’ve ever used. Even an unmodified Solaris install is nicer.)
From all the BS that SCO throws at Linux you would think that they would have a far better poduct. But in reality they aren’t even close to Linux, Solaris or W2k3.
I still find it humorous that I can buy a UnixWare license for only marginally less than I can buy a server to run it on for. I mean, Dell was running a special last month to get a (admittedly minimal) server for $299. I just can’t see spending 2.5-3.0x as much for the OS license than I did for the hardware.
I have used SCO products since the XENIX days.
I am currently running Linux.
SCO has always been:
…rock solid, simple, expensive
…rock solid, lacking good tools, expensive
…rock solid, boring, expensive
You get the idea.
B
“Also, with the need to license other software components, the product becomes even more unattractive from a business perspective”.
Well, that’s what Microsoft and other companies have been doing all these years. It’s not like you can do a lot of stuff with a just installed Windows box.
But anyways, I see your point. A GNU/Linux CD comes with a thousand free software packages to choose from.
The only benchmarks run were comparing OpenSSL computation in native UnixWare mode versus Linux Kernel Personality (LKP) mode. This is an extremely poor test and shows that the reviewer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
LKP is basicly system call emulation like that which is available in FreeBSD. This has NOTHING to do with pure user-space number crunching required of crypto computations! This kind of test would only show the most eggregrarious scheduling or interrupt handler errors in providing the LKP functionality. This wouldn’t (shouldn’t?) even show up any compiler differences between UnixWare’s cc and GCC since OpenSSL is heavily assembly optimzed on x86.
These numbers arn’t even compared to running under a real Linux kernel, which would be the most logical course of action given the reviewer’s incomplete understanding.
But regardless, with comments like the following, it becomes painfully obvious the reviewer knows little about this:
The Linux kernel version number piqued my interest, because of the recent kernel vulnerability responsible for the compromise of some Debian project servers. I’m not sure if the same kernel exploit would work in the LKP, but it’d be an interesting test.
If anything, benchmarking system calls should have been done. Something along the lines of these tests: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
The reviewer makes his bias very plain with passages such as:
I want to be as objective as possible, but I’d be a fool to think such a review could possibly avoid the controversy and raw emotions surrounding the company offering the product I’ve chosen to evaluate.
This combined with the lack of objective and useful benchmarks makes this article little more than a piece of cheerleading propoganda.
-molo
and have thus far found it one of the most user-hostile unixes I’ve ever used
I have a copy of UnixWare 7.1.1 with an educational license. This was before Caldera acquired SCO. I don’t install it for about 1 year but CDE is a rock and the admin/config tools are quite good for an Unix. However, the shell is the most unfriendly and naked interface I ever saw. (but I’ve no big experience).
Prices: This kind of OS is to be used with hundreds/thousands of Windows clients not just to dploy a web server.
(I know that here in Europe, at least, an airline and Rover Car Spare Parts base their WANs on SCO, they don’t complain).
just thought i should point that out as it seems that that change happened before your article was posted. So to sumarise linux, bsd, solaris are cheap or free more supported and arent followed by a pack of vultures ready to grab at their carcas when they inevitably die. Damn id be even less likely to recommend UnixWare or whatever they are calling ti now then windows
I found it and the comments very interesting. Thanks to all of you.
This is one of the very few reviews I have ever found on Unixware. With the current mess going on it is nice for a OS idiot like me to be able to see some of the details of this OS.
Here are some problems I have with UnixWare and SCO.
1) Sent the sales department an emale requesting information on the purchasing of a workstation license for UnixWare, I never received a reply. The whine they have no customers yet they do nothing to improve the situation. How is this related? why would I use a product with poor pre and after sales support? why should I part with thousands mearly to he ignored?
2) UnixWare is stagnant. They have done nothing to improve the product. As pointed out in the article, it still uses X11R5 and still sticks to CDE. People may give Solaris and SUN a hard time but atleast they’re doing their best to improve these products rather than sitting around, whining about a lack of customers and trying to sue everything and everyone under the sun.
3) UnixWare has the potential to be a great product, but it is unfortunate that the management are too concerned about suing rather than actually building a better product. Maybe when the ship goes down and the rats jump overboard, someone will purchase the remains and do something constructive with it.
If it were me, I would firstly purchase a “jumbo” license off QT, adopt KDE, majorly tweak the interface, migrate all the management tools over to it, oh and update the X server to R6.7.
Here are some problems I have with UnixWare and SCO.
1) Sent the sales department an emale requesting information on the purchasing of a workstation license for UnixWare, I never received a reply. The whine they have no customers yet they do nothing to improve the situation. How is this related? why would I use a product with poor pre and after sales support? why should I part with thousands mearly to he ignored?
2) UnixWare is stagnant. They have done nothing to improve the product. As pointed out in the article, it still uses X11R5 and still sticks to CDE. People may give Solaris and SUN a hard time but atleast they’re doing their best to improve these products rather than sitting around, whining about a lack of customers and trying to sue everything and everyone under the sun.
3) UnixWare has the potential to be a great product, but it is unfortunate that the management are too concerned about suing rather than actually building a better product. Maybe when the ship goes down and the rats jump overboard, someone will purchase the remains and do something constructive with it.
If it were me, I would firstly purchase a “jumbo” license off QT, adopt KDE, majorly tweak the interface, migrate all the management tools over to it, oh and update the X server to R6.7.
Although there appears to be some effort at an impartial review of SCO, politics is important. Reality is and will always include politics because were all human. Uh..I think. Anyway…The decision to apply an operating system to a problem cannot ever be devoid of economics either. They’re all intertwined. What does this all mean? It means that I would be reluctant to bet my company’s investment in an IT resource that I thought would be derived from a company on the edge of extinction. The animosity SCO has aroused has seriously impacted it’s long term viability as an ongoing OS business. Sure a corporate skeleton may linger as a way to collect license fees for certain intellectual properties. I’m not sure the current Linux challenges will be one of fees this carcass will collect from. They will go on in that mode only long term. Development of new intelectual properties will wane. No more OS development will occur. The OS will become an orphan or it will be acquired by another organization. I also would refer to Rambus as a hardware analogy to consider.
Thank you for this excellent review. Especially given the political load of the company in subject on other grounds.
“UnixWare = VaporWare
By Alex (IP: —.client.comcast.net) – Posted on 2003-12-16 01:40:42
From all the BS that SCO throws at Linux you would think that they would have a far better poduct. But in reality they aren’t even close to Linux, Solaris or W2k3.”
Quoteth Webopedia.com
Vaporware definition: “A sarcastic term used to designate software and hardware products that have been announced and advertised but are not yet available.” Source: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/v/vaporware.html
My 3 examples: GNU/HURD, AmigaOS4, Microsoft Longhorn.
UnixWare is not for SCO UnixWare is available. I think that last thing is quite clear.
Wired.com writes:
“[..] And remember, if it shipped — even if it stank — it’s not vaporware.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61586,00.html?tw=wn_top… (about the vaporware awards 2003). You would not be able to succesfully submit UnixWare.
“unix survivor
By df (IP: —.in-addr.btopenworld.com) – Posted on 2003-12-15 23:31:47
you also have to remember, unixware is a unix that has surived, there is a litany of those that havent (much to my disappointment, BSDI!). it WILL be the next commercial unix to die, but it has survived this long, if it was really bad, it would have died out long ago.
using unixware is like using an unpolished old version of solaris. if sun didnt put the work into solaris they have, youd get unixware.
it served its time well and should be retired.”
I don’t think the life cyclus of an OS, hardware, or software is necessarily correlated with the quality. Example: DEC Alpha, Amiga…
As for your other comment regarding Solaris: it thrives mainly on another architecture. Or are you comparing with Solaris x86?
Not that I use any SCO product, or that I would consider it, but this really was a nice to read review. By the looks of it, SCO has a nice IP in its hands with its “Personality” stuff. If they could leverage this knowledge and experience for other *nix like OS’es they might actually have a viable product to compete in a market which is still wide open (virtual computing, compatibility layers). As it is now though, SCO seems to be more interrested in making money from litigation than from competing in an honest market.
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting the purpose and/or implementation of this “Personality” business, but isn’t this basically just the same thing that FreeBSD is implementing with its support for Linux binaries? And isn’t the FreeBSD implementation available at no cost, through the BSD license, to anyone who wants to use it? I couldn’t imagine SCO, even had their reputation not imploded, making any money off of this.
What a fantastic review! I love it! It would be better if you can provide some screenshot on CDE GUI.
For costing hundreds of dollars more, UnixWare does not have a single feature which is stronger than Linux, not one! You have to admire SCO for having the nerves to put such piece of crap on the market, much less putting such a ridiculous price tag on it. You have to be out of your friggin’ mind if you actually think about using UnixWare.
I wouldn’t be surprised if SCO would hold a press conference declaring success as soon as some retard actually buys the first copy, just like they did with their Linux license.
To me there are not much hope for the future of UnixWare as long as the current management of SCO still in controlled. By looking at the pricing scheme anyone can tell how greedy they are. Unless UnixWare are a lot more superior to Solaris or other OS, the pricing just not justifiable especially when considering the availability of open source OS such as *BSD and Linux at the price that a lot more cheaper.
MS make their fortune not by greed alone by the strategy they use which SCO should learn. Yeaaaahhh, bringing Linux to court maybe one of their strategy but in my opinion it will just fail. My only hope is that the good engineer/programmer in SCO are tnot as greed as their management.
no i was comparing unixware to the most polished of the sysvr5 bases. unixware IS like an unpolished solarish. at one time it did have potential, but I dont think SCO are investing the $$$ on development on it.
unixware sites exist, but i really think it will be the next proprietory unix to become extinct, and running it will be akin to running coherant or something.
Somebody wrote:
“One thing did stick out to me: playing with a real Unix hammered home how horrible Linux’s disk management was. Linux was trying to give SCSI drives drive letters? Linux’s ties to cheap hardware still seems to be a downfall for it, just as Unix’s ties to expensive hardware are for it.”
Linux DOES not assign SCSI drives “Drive Letters”.
It assigns /dev/sd?x where ? is a letter and x is a partition
number. And of course via the /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab you
mount the /dev/sd?x to a particular place in the filesystem.
About Linux and hardware. Linux supports both cheap and expensive enterprise level hardware of many architectures…
I don’t know where you are getting your information, but you are CLEARLY uninformed.
well, the benchmark in the article means less than 0. It would mean exactly 0 if it wasn’t misleading, but as it stands, it’s counterproductive at best.
Linux SCSI drive and partition enumeration: above poster is right, but that doesn’t make it any easier to work with lots of SCSI drives. /dev/sdXY, where X is a letter of the english alphabet, and enumerates the SCSI drives, makes it more difficult to work with large SCSI or fiberchannel setups.
I understand that reviewer actually didn’t work with Unixware before, but still, before making review it would be pretty useful to check what are the real features of OS comparing to other.
I didn’t touch Unixware for 2 years but then in some areas it was clearly ahead of Linux.
1. AIO – pathetic on Linux. Dirty hack from Oracle would so the trick, but only for Oracle. It’s almost impossible to compile any serious program using AIO on Linux. Seems like 2.6 catching on this.
2. Volume management and filesystems. If you have only one HD – you don’t need this, but in other case it’s just could be a lifesafer. Until recent port of JSF and XFS, xmm.. Linux wasn’t close to enterprise ready.
3. Multiprocessor and Threads. 2.4 was baby on 4 processors server comparing to Unixware 2 years ago (my personal tests). Seem like 2.6 is picking on this as well.
4. System monitoring. Taking care of one server is nice, but what about dosen of them. Remote monitoring was hugely important. Don’t really know current state on Linux on this, but I assume all these enterprise distribution have this.
5. Windows compatible networking. Samba of course is very nice and all, but then 2 years ago it couldn’t be integrated with existing Windows domains so easily as SCO solution (having MS code was very handy of course).
So, the bottom line is: It could be really interesting to see review which measures performance and scalability of enterprise OS in enterprise configuration and comparing ENTERPRISE features. Even 4 years ago Linux on uniprocessor for workstation was much more usefull than SCO, but on server it was completely different. 2.6 vs Uniware vs Solaris x86 on 8 way box would be extremely interesting reading.
I personally don’t like current course of the SCO, but we shouldn’t compare the OS based on politics.
P.S. Sorry for my bad English.
At my last job we used a 486 machine still on our SCO v3.2 box. This box was a literal workhorse, it ran a company wide management package which included: Full POS support, Accounting package, departmental inventories, specialized management, etc.. And yes it was very specific to SCO as it ran using the old BuisnessBasic 90 language that many older coders will know. I had alot of respect for the operating systems stability, and yes I agree with many of the previous posters in saying the SCO now is not the SCO that developed these workhorses.
“Linux offers a far greater value and far better enterprise application support. In addition to Linux, FreeBSD and the other BSDs, and Linux offer a far better open source environment, better hardware support, and more features.”
Which explains why UnixWare doesn’t compare favorably to Linux. Looks like SCO should spend time and money trying to improve their product instead of waging a jihad against Linux. When its all said and done, Linux will bury them.
AFAIK, UnixWare was develloped by Novell and acquired in 1995 by SCO, that had its own system – Open Server. SCO tried to merge these systems, but failed. We have to agree that Santa Cruz Operations, Novell and pre-McBride Caldera have made a lot of good to *nix technology. But now these two SCO’s products are totally deprecated and highly overpriced. SCO now isn’t interested in developping products – they only pretend to be technological company, they even dont’t care to market these products properly.
SCO’s business model is litigation only.
If I had to choose between UnixWare and Windows, I’d go with 2003 Server, it’s cheaper and application support is superior. But… I already chose Linux instead.
—
Quote: 2) UnixWare is stagnant. They have done nothing to improve the product. As pointed out in the article, it still uses X11R5 and still sticks to CDE. People may give Solaris and SUN a hard time but atleast they’re doing their best to improve these products rather than sitting around, whining about a lack of customers and trying to sue everything and everyone under the sun.
—
You missed one very important note with UW’s age – not only is the included software for it stagnant, the hardware support for it is even worse. It has the absolute worst hardware support you will ever see. Dont even bother trying to get it running well on anything cutting edge, and even semi-modern hardware gives it trouble.
Dont even get me started ranting about security or stability issues with it.
I used Unixware 2.X and 7.0 before at a previous employer. I still have nightmares about it.
“Dont even bother trying to get it running well on anything cutting edge, and even semi-modern hardware gives it trouble. ”
Thats just plain not true. You were using Unixware 2.x &7.0 which are OLD. UnixWare 7.1.3 has much better hardware support.
Further with regards to the CDE and X11R5 comments… Agreed that CDE is fugly, but most customer sites I’ve been to that run UnixWare aren’t using it for it’s pretty desktop.
regards
-jim
This was a very usefull review. Thank you.
Just wanted to quickly say that was a very nice review.
Still no benchmarks on programs against other similar OS’s but very good in terms of installation, compatability and software etc. If more people write like this I will be very happy!
Even Microsoft is a better company than the SCO. That’s a low blow to the sofware industry because Microsoft is a criminal monopoly. Why do these types exist in the land of liberty and freedom. Surely they are connected to Alciada in some way, shape, or form.
His speed test is very flawed. Generating rsa/dsa keys is almost purly cpu work. Little to none system calls. So unless the code actually runs in an interpreter, one could not expect these to differ much.
Again, I could be completey wrong about something, but as far as I know in linux scsi drivers are listed as /dev/scd0, /dev/scd1, etc, and in other unixes you just replace the scd* w/ some other abreivation.”
Linux numbering of SCSI devices suffers the same problem as w32 drive letters; if you add a device at a SCSI id between two pre-existing devices of the same class all devices with higher bus,target,lun values get their /dev entries incremented. This sucks.
SysV UNIX uses absoluste /dev entries for SCSI, much as Linux does with IDE. This does not suck.