RE: MIDRANGE-L Digest, Vol 2, Issue 331

["Urbanek, Marty" <Marty_Urbanek@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom,

Do not assume things from UNIX are going to work in either qsh or PASE. They
are both very good, but they don't take you 100% of the way there. I have
been amazed by both what does work and what doesn't. Some of it appears to
be political, i.e. if they give you a complete AIX environment as part of
OS/400 for free, what's that going to do to AIX sales, especially in
development shops? (JUST MY OPINION)

If you're trying to run something small and simple, you're probably in good
shape. Otherwise, your "tweaking" may be substantial. If you have an AIX
executable, they have some tools you can run, then IBM analyzes your output
against system APIs that are used and tells you how close you are (or you
can just try it). I found some differences in what functions were contained
in what shared libraries, such that programs that were not statically linked
may not work. 

V5R2 PASE is supposed to be runtime compatible with AIX 5L, I believe. V5R1
was pretty darn good too, but not 100%. 

Shell scripts are another issue. Again, pretty darn good if you appreciate
that OS/400 is not UNIX, but if you turn a UNIX guy loose on it he will not
have everything he is used to. Some things that work in qshell (like java)
do not work in PASE and vice versa. Depending on licensing, in some cases
you can download AIX tools and use them in PASE.

Start qshell with QSH or STRQSH

Start PASE with CALL QP2TERM (first install option 30 of OS/400 SS1 licpgm).

-Marty

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Hightower [mailto:tomh@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 10:56 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: QSH and PASE

Someone asked me today if they can 'install Unix on a 400'.  I told them 
that I believe the iSeries has a built-in Unix environment called PASE, and 
that you create a logical partitition to install and run Linux if they 
wanted to go that route instead.  But I'm not altogether clear on just what 
QSH and PASE are, or what I can do with them.

What can I do with QSH and PASE?

Is QSH just the command used to get into the PASE enviroment?

Can I somehow take Unix code and run it on the iSeries (with appropriate 
tweaking)?