A/UX Release 2.0 (long)

[William Roberts]

In article <14743 at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> oberst at phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel J. Oberst) writes:
>Some early reactions of an A/UX 2.0 beta tester:
>
>A/UX 2.0, the latest version of Apple's UNIX offering, is what
>Apple's UNIX should have been all along.

Agreed.

>When I first installed the
>software,it appeared that the installation had failed, and I tried
>to re-launch the installer program--surprise!! A/UX *WAS* installed!
>Only the Mac Desktop and icons looked and worked so much like MacOS
>I couldn't superficially tell it was UNIX!

Don't be silly - who ever heard of a Mac volume called "/"???

>Basically, A/UX lives in one Multifinder layer that lets you set up
>multiple terminal windows from which you can run UNIX (A/UX)
>applications,moniter UNIX processes, and do other UNIX-y sorts of
>things (much like the 'term' program from earlier versions plus a
>console window). In the other layers you run whatever MacOS
>applications you want.

A/UX is the operating system. If you want A/UX 1 style console
emulations you can have it. If you want to run the window
system, you can: just like Suns & Suntools, except that the
window system is MultiFinder and there is a window system login
program. The CommandShell application is the equivalent of
commandtool, except that one application handles all of the
windows, rather than one program per terminal window. Note that
Mac/Sun comparisons in this message come with the same "good
and bad sex" distinction as the widely reported
MacPaint/SunPaint comparison...

>Appletalk works (either over Ethernet or
>LocalTalk); you can access AppleShare volumes; print to a networked
>LaserWriter, use Broadcast, or do whatever you would otherwise do in
>a Mac environment.

Yes indeed. AppleTalk phase 2 though, so upgrade those
FastPaths to understand ETherTalk phase 2.. I am doing a CAP
port for "AppleTalk for A/UX" which is the unbundled A/UX 1.1 stuff.

>Your MacOS/Multifinder environment gets a chunk
>of memory equivalent to your installed RAM. So a 4 MB Mac with A/UX
>2.0 gets a 4MB Multifinder environment, and A/UX's memory management
>keeps it and the MacOS side of the house happy in that space.

Beta software may change. There's no reason for this arbitrary
limit and I for one want it raise to the size of the swap
space. After all, A/UX itself takes a megabyte or more like all
the other Unix kernels these days, so that "4 Meg" is using
virtual memory anyway.

>Furthermore, your UNIX files can also be accessed from the desktop
>(or via the standard UNIX command line if you wish), directories
>appear as folders, your NFS-mounted remote files systems just show
>up as folders within your "root" volume (it appears as a hard disk
>with the name '/') on your desktop.

The Finder does a bit more than this in the way of "type
guessing" for A/UX files: it looks at the permissions bits to
see if it's executable (for example).

>If you want or need it, though, you have a command line environment
>available. It also includes a powerful 'Commando" feature.(UNIX die-
>hards would call it a crutch.) Based on a utility found in MPW, it
>allows you to start a command, and then call up a window that lets
>you select options and arguments using radio buttons and menus, and
>interactively builds the command line for you.

It's quite a good "what does this do" alternative to the manual
page as well. New tools provide new ways of working.

>Note also that while MacOS applications and the desktop are aware of
>the UNIX files and file system, the A/UX side of the house can only
>deal with its own (and NFS-mounted) files. Now of course if MacOS
>ran an NFS-server...

Not relevant, though we did do some work on an NFS server
process on A/UX that served the Mac filestore. MacOS doesn't
come into it, and AppleShare does work for Mac applications.

>All this flexibility comes at a price. Running a very early beta
>release of the software ...

I don't expect that either you or I will be beta-testing ever
again after this. Beta testing is *SUPPOSED* to be a secretive
activity so that the bugs are ironed out *IN PRIVATE* and the
final product works properly. Saying that
beta software doesn't work very well is both unnecessary and
unhelpful: months from now people will be saying "well, they
said on the net that A/UX is really sluggish" and it will be
YOUR FAULT.

>The 'battle for the desktop' now has several contenders, with Mac-
>on-UNIX added to NeXTSTeP-on-UNIX, Motif-on-UNIX, OpenLook-on-UNIX,
>and Presentation-Manager-on-OS/2 (not to mention Apple's own System
>7 which debuts this summer) all fighting to win the GUI (Graphic
>User Interface) Wars. In terms of a migration strategy, however,
>A/UX 2.0 seems like a real a break-through that will allow users to
>move to a multi-tasking operating system without losing their
>environment and software investments.

The desktop wars are all based on marketing hype. The neatest
idea was NeWS, but that now has a reputation as being "sluggish"
and in fact the main impetus behind the X11 surge was the
prospect of Sun doing their NFS trick again with NeWS.
Naturally Dec et al didn't fancy that, so they pulled out all
the stops and formed the X Consortium.

My personal opinion (another problem about beta testers doing
Kiss-and-tell postings to the net is that everything they say
is taken as insider information) goes as follows:

1) Sun don't care about you if you haven't got a big SPARC and
so, sadly, NeWS will become marginalised and eventually forgotten.

2) X11 will stick because it works, is well designed and fills
a need. X toolkits will come in and out of fashion much like
hemlines, because there isn't any way to force people to use
them and they offer "standards by negotiation" not "take it or
leave it".

3) Apple are right to care as much as they do about the Mac
toolbox: if anything they have stopped caring enough (look at
the abominable mess of different scanner image file formats -
think 32 bit Quickdraw will fix that? No Way).

4) A/UX and SunOS are the current innovators in the UNIX
interface (MACH is the innovator in UNIX internals, but that's
a different story). A/UX 1.1 proved that Apple can run Unix as
well as the next Motorola machine, though the IIfx hardware
improvements are very welcome. A/UX 2 adds the Mac desktop to
UNIX and this is something I want to see my students using, but
it is a mixture of Mac APplications and UNIX applications,
which the Mac libraries available to UNIX programmers.

I'd like to see future A/UX systems doing innovative things
with direct manipulation of UNIX ideas like pipes and filters.

I suspect that I will now get into serious trouble with the
people who suggested me as a beta site, but I couldn't just sit
on my hands and let that message go by...
-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)