Re: Check this out. iSeries Access for Linux!!

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adam Lang wrote:
> I didn't say Eclipse is a run time environment, but it is supposed to make
> the applications for Java run at a lot better speeds due to how they handle
> windowing.
>
> My point is, if they design it with certain cross platform technologies and
> practices in mind, getting it to run on multiple platforms shouldn't be too
> hard, now a days.

From it sounds like the problem isn't that they used platform specific 
technologies, but rather that they did absolutely stupid things like 
hard coding locations of things instead of using the $PATH or the 
standard ldconfig library loading scheme.  Using eclipse or java 
wouldn't fix stupid stuff like that.  Heck, it's perfectly possible to 
write a fully functional emulator that is cross platform in a language 
as simple as C.

As for giving them a break, look at all the other things out there that 
run on all versions of linux.  How about mozilla?  There isn't a 
mozilla-redhat.rpm - just get the same mozilla binary everyone else does 
and it works on red hat, debian, suse, mandrake, xandros, gentoo, 
slackware, etc.  And you don't need to have rpm to install moz either. 
It would be trivial to make a bsd version, and osx version, a linux 
(whatever distro) by simply compiling it for each platform and coding 
decently.  Surely a billion dollars can buy that.

But I am pleased that it exists nevertheless.  It is very hard to say 
anything more than that about it since I can't run it.  And the reasons 
I can't run it are to me very silly.  But still, kudos to IBM.

James Rich