RE: Say Hello to IBM System i5

["Urbanek, Marty" <Marty_Urbanek@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Just out of curiosity, do any of them get to use any of the shells under 
> PASE? That is, it's been pretty hard to dismiss iSeries as 'not being UNIX' 
> for quite a while now. Granted, there may be apps and utilities that you 
> don't have installed; but I'm pretty sure every UNIX box in your organization 
> has a few apps and utilities missing also.

Tom,

Don't sweat the "personal thing". ;)

As for the shell business, no, we don't let them use the PASE shells because 
our product runs under qshell and we want to minimize confusion. Whatever the 
developers do, we need to make sure it works in qshell, so we only show them 
qshell. In the long run, we may move to PASE, once Java goes there, and then we 
may switch to the opposite tactic.

In general, the UNIX people are somewhat comfortable in qshell. Perhaps too 
much, because what freaks them out is when they can't do things like netstat or 
df or look at "standard" UNIX config files (for networking, etc) or use the 
editors they are used to. The fact is that the underlying machine is not UNIX, 
and at some point they bump heads with that reality. But as for the general 
"getting around" type of things, qshell is a pretty good facade. 

Actually I think people don't give that facade the credit it deserves because 
they don't know how far a stretch it is to go from the SEU, RPG, batch, PF/LF 
world to the stream file, SQL, Java world on the same machine, at the same 
time. They think, "Wow - this is really a crappy UNIX..." and there's just no 
way to explain to them how good they have it compared to if they really had to 
learn OS/400. When they occasionally see the "real" AS/400 people working on 
something, they are usually in awe and we see a glimmer of, "Wow - this really 
*isn't* UNIX..." I think only those of us who've been here long enough to see 
both sides can really appreciate this, unfortunately, because it is a hell of 
an accomplishment

We also have 5799-PTL installed and that takes care of a few missing pieces, 
like awk. We even had a couple people try VNC for a while but that goes into 
PASE shell. Like I said, maybe someday we'll go that way.

-Marty