[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-01-20 13:57:17 +0000, MG said:

> I recently assembled a barebone mini-PC with a Core i7 quad-
> core processor, 16 Gbytes RAM and a SSD disk.  The silence,
> just great!

For those not so inclined to build their own box, a Mac Mini or Mac 
Mini Server is a sleeper.

OpenVMS has no new entry-level servers available — this as David 
Dachtera has been fond of referencing — and the "low-end" Itanium boxes 
have somewhere between substantial and massively excessive performance 
for many applications.  Or yes, you can use emulation.  See my previous 
comments there.

> Embedded Linux definitely has its uses, but it never really attracted
> me too much though.  One thing is for sure, it's often not like a
> 'vanilla' Linux installation, with a lot of custom(ized) software
> from certain manufacturers, often with a clothed down kernel to go
> with it and a restricted userland, sometimes even no 'super user'
> access...

More and more folks doing development are doing cross-platform work; 
using one set of tools and one set of boxes to build stuff that runs... 
well, elsewhere, and that "embedded" software may well provide services 
for yet other systems.  Whether that's a phone or a tablet, or the bits 
in a fancy home appliance, or the bits inside a storage controller, or 
a cloud server, that's what is increasingly expected and typical.

Cloud services in particular — often remote, and sometimes in-house — 
can get many folks out of the business of maintaining servers and 
hardware, even when writing and maintaining the application software; 
that's industrial-scale computing.  Part of all that — even when you're 
running your own server farms — is the necessity to manage dozens and 
hundreds and various more servers, and to transfer the application code 
and the OS-level code around, and to process and decode and manage the 
inevitable crashes and errors.  The hardware and the operating system 
and the products are part of the appliance.

With OpenVMS in these ever-larger and ever-more-embedded 
environments...  If anybody knows of devops tools or frameworks that 
can remote develop and upload software and download and process crash 
reports for OpenVMS servers, I'm interested.  I'm not referring to an 
IDE here, but devops tools for pushing and pulling updates and for 
processing crash reports, bugs and related.  
<http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org>, <http://puppetlabs.com> 
<http://www.opscode.com/chef/>, and such.

> Games, as we already established (unless it's of the small-time 'time
> killing' variety on iOS and Android), are not exactly the forté of
> Linux...

Might want to catch up on what the Valve Linux team 
<http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/Linux/> are up to 
<http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/144951-valve-confirms-linux-steam-box-for-2013-but-can-it-really-disrupt-pc-and-console-gaming>, 
among other changes.

> What about Photoshop, when will it finally appear?  It has been
> over 20 years or so, but still nothing.  It's just one example
> and a very well-known one, too.

Locally, tools such as Acorn <http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/> meet the 
requirements.

Adobe has far too many issues; an organization ripe for competition.



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