Re: Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i

Den 09/10/10 07.23, Scott Klement skrev:

On 10/8/2010 8:21 PM, Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

Pity that IBM chose PASE to be AIX emulation instead of Linux
emulation. If it had been the latter we would have had the whole world
of Ubuntu and others instantly accessible. Oh well.

You wouldn't believe how many times I've said that to myself! Imagine
the vast array of software we'd have available if PASE emulated Linux
instead of AIX!

Actually I don't believe it already :) Please tell :)

But, alas, it's probably not as much as it sounds. After all, virtually
all Linux software is written/tested on x86 PCs.. a lot of it would
have to be specially ported to run on POWER. By contrast, AIX stuff
always runs on POWER.

It is as much as it sounds.

The porting effort happens to be done already, as Debian (which Ubuntu builds on) officially supports the "powerpc" architecture, and all Debian packages available on this architecture should be buildable. This includes the whole compiler chain, so the building pipeline itself can be bootstrapped somewhat easily.

So the situation is actually opposite of what you describe. A lot of software available under Linux can be run on Power hardware, but very little software is available for AIX as AIX is very rarely available to people who have not paid up front because they just need it to work for the job they are paid to do.

It is my general experience that it is simply too painful to get any piece of open source software up and running on the i (especially customers i), and that we should stick solely to Java based software as the IBM JVM works almost like any other Unix JVM and if the Java program runs on Linux in headless mode it will run on the i. Pity.

But, I still think Linux would be better.

I agree. The current situation works well, but just makes it easier to run existing AIX software. For a real change to happen, more is needed.