Re: Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i

[Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen <ravn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

 Den 09/10/10 07.23, Scott Klement skrev:
> On 10/8/2010 8:21 PM, Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:
> > Pity that IBM chose PASE to be AIX emulation instead of Linux
> > emulation.  If it had been the latter we would have had the whole world
> > of Ubuntu and others instantly accessible.  Oh well.
> You wouldn't believe how many times I've said that to myself!  Imagine
> the vast array of software we'd have available if PASE emulated Linux
> instead of AIX!
Actually I don't believe it already :)  Please tell :)

> But, alas, it's probably not as much as it sounds.  After all, virtually
> all Linux software is written/tested on x86 PCs..  a lot of it would
> have to be specially ported to run on POWER.  By contrast, AIX stuff
> always runs on POWER.
It is as much as it sounds.

The porting effort happens to be done already, as Debian (which Ubuntu 
builds on) officially supports the "powerpc" architecture, and all 
Debian packages available on this architecture should be buildable.   
This includes the whole compiler chain, so the building pipeline itself 
can be bootstrapped somewhat easily.

So the situation is actually opposite of what you describe.  A lot of 
software available under Linux can be run on Power hardware, but very 
little software is available for AIX as AIX is very rarely available to 
people who have not paid up front because they just need it to work for 
the job they are paid to do.

It is my general experience that it is simply too painful to get any 
piece of open source software up and running on the i (especially 
customers i), and that we should stick solely to Java based software as 
the IBM JVM works almost like any other Unix JVM and if the Java program 
runs on Linux in headless mode it will run on the i.  Pity.

> But, I still think Linux would be better.
I agree.  The current situation works well, but just makes it easier to 
run existing AIX software.  For a real change to happen, more is needed.