How well do HP and SUN workstations mix

[Fletcher Kittredge]

schultz at mmm.serc.3m.com (John C Schultz) writes:
>We would like to add an HP 9000/340 or 350 (w its own boot disk and tape
>drive) to an existing small network of SUN stations - all SUN 3
>somethings....How close is HP's UNIX to SunOS?...

1) We have such an environment, and it works quite well.  Actually, in our
environment, we have workstations from a large number of vendors
co-existing without major problems.

2) HP-UX is not close to Sun O/S at all.  However, if you are not a Unix
hacker, you probably won't notice.  HP-UX has a pretty good compatibilty
package, with the major, inexplicable exception of lack of Unix domain
sockets.

>The only difficulty I can see is that complex software such as the GNU
>code tends to require different flags to compile/link as compared to SUN
>systems.

3) Since the HPs are faster, we have our general purpose software live on
them.  On our main HP server, I have one copy of the main GNU packages, I
then symlink the sources into various platform specific directories.
Presently we have architecture specific directories for the Sun4, VAX
Ultrix, Sun3, HP300 and HP800.  To compile, we just break the link to the
configuration specific files, modify them and run the make.  The objects
end up the the platform specific directories.  This process is surprising
easy.  For instance, I think that for GNU emacs the only file unique to a
platform is "config.h" (we share the same copy of the lisp code between
all systems.)

4) My impression is as of 1/19/88, HPs support of X11 is second to none,
many of their own utilities are built on top of it.  Their current
supported version is X11R2+, with the + being backing store and bug fixes.

5) One caveat is that this is a porting, X mumbling, Unix hacking group;
there may be problems we don't notice that a different group might find
bothersome.

regards,
fletcher

Fletcher E. Kittredge  fkittred at bbn.com