SCO Thwarted In Unix Decision

Some final matters of law still need to be hammered out, but it looks like a decision handed down in Utah by federal judge Dale Kimball has finally knocked out SCO’s claims to Unix copyrights.

Their lawsuit against Novell has drawn a 102-page ruling from the bench, and as Pamela Jones at Groklaw noted, it’s all about Novell:

Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

That’s Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent". That’s the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.

Groklaw also said the trial scheduled for September 17th "appears it will mostly (but not all) be about what SCO owes Novell. Novell’s slander of title counterclaim goes to trial, for example, but SCO’s does not."

SCO responded to the decision with a statement, saying they were "obviously disappointed" in the ruling.

"However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after Novell transferred the assets to SCO in 1995," said SCO.

Both Microsoft and Sun licensed Unix technology from SCO in 2003.

Neither licensee has released a statement yet regarding the Utah court’s decision. The stock market has weighed in with its opinion, and the verdict from Wall Street has been a bigger bloodbath than the last Harry Potter novel.

Shares of SCO plunged from their 1.56 open to a current price of 44 cents. SCO may present a defiant tone in their post-verdict statement, but investors aren’t listening.

The terse answer was, of course,

script &

While perfectly correct, that leaves out so much. I started to write what I thought would be a more complete response, but quickly realized that there is an awful lot to cover, and some of it is pretty complicated.

The new Unix user actually has a lot to learn about this.

There’s the matter of controlling the output, the job priority, and interrupts. For more complex situations, process groups could be important. Job control is a whole subject by itself. It gets deep fast.

And to what purpose? Nowadays it is unusual for the average user to have any need of background processing: we just open another window. If we need to reduce priority (which is also pretty rare today), we “nice” the process in that window. Interrupts, process groups, job control: who cares?

I looked up “background process group” in Stevens “Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment” and took a trip down memory lane.. I haven’t even thought about most of that in many years.

Probably only a few people have any need to know anything about this, and most of those only need it to pass a beginner computer science course.

A very few tech people stuck doing support for ancient systems that only provide modem access may need to remember some of this now and then, but for the rest of us, it’s almost completely dead.

When was the last time you needed shell background processing and why?

I don’t even own any modems anymore, but now and then I’ll leave something running with “nohup” on some customer system.. but since everything runs so fast nowadays, that’s pretty unusual too.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Finally this week someone in a newsgroup pointed me to this:

(from Bill’s speech at Unix Expo October 9th 1996)

And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And that’s no accident. I mean, we knew that Unix operability would be very important and we knew that the largest body of programmers that we’d want to draw on in building Windows NT applications would certainly come from the Unix base.

I mention this for several reasons. One is to add yet another data point to the web referencing Bill Gates and Unix.

As I said, I had misremembered: I thought he had said something like “Windows NT is effectively Unix” and I’ve heard other people insist it was more like “Windows NT is a better UNIX than UNIX”. Of course it’s still possible that he did say those other things also – but I’m happy enough with this quote for now.

In light of the recent saber rattling about Linux and patents, the “There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment” sentence is particularly interesting if these patent threats include things that are prior Unix art. “In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix” is also telling.

I said before that I don’t think that’s the case; I think the patent stuff is talking about things like Samba and Mono, but even there the “influenced by that environment” could be important in the court of public opinion if not in actual law.

In any case, these sentences do remind us of the time when Microsoft at least had grudging respect for Unix.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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As I was working on that, I remember wondering how on earth I would ever have been able to do it if I ran this site on a Microsoft server. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, of course, just that it would have taken longer and would have been more frustrating. It is true that I could use Perl or some other Windows available scripting language, or have installed Windows Services for Unix or MKS Toolkit, but sheesh: why pretend when you can have the real thing?

Of course I did use Perl for a lot of it. For example, this simple script did a lot of the necessary work:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$file=shift @ARGV;
print "$file\n";
open(F,"$file") or die "$!";
@lines=;

open(F,">$file") or die "$!";
   foreach (@lines) {
    s/xmlheader"/xmlheader2"/;
    s/div id="page"/div id="doc3"/;
    s/onepage.pl/newpage.pl/;
    print F $_ ;
    }

But that wasn’t enough to handle everything. Some of the rest I did with other Perl scripts, some with sed, grep and the other usual Unix tools. Here’s a little one liner I found very handy for showing me what I still needed to work on:

grep -L "$1" *.html

Basically that quickly shows you the files that do NOT contain whatever pattern you give it. If you are working on a very old system without -L, this script will do a similar job:

grep -l "$1" *.html >~/a
ls *.html > ~/b
diff ~/a ~/b | sort

Another helpful little bit is this:

grep -h "$1" *.html | sort -u

That helps for identifying what other editing scripts will have to be looking for.

Probably most missed would have been Vi and the ability to pass portions of a file for editing by external scripts. Something as simple as

:16,25!myedits

(where “myedits” is a Perl, sed or whatever script containing multiple editing commands) can save hours, as can assigning repetitive tasks to macros.

I’m not 100% done with the cleanup. There are still parts of the site I haven’t gotten to, and other parts where I just did the bare minimum and need to return for more work. But it is largely complete, and I’m reasonably happy with the new look. I hope the readers agree.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

I use unix quite a bit, usually either on one of our Linux servers, or on my Powerbook with OS X. And these are the 15 commands that I use most. If you can memorize these 15 commands, you can do quite a bit on a unix operating system, and add unix as a skill on your resume.

The 15 Most Important UNIX commands

1. man - show manual for a command, example: man ls hit q to exit the man page.

2. cd – change directory, example: cd /etc/

3. ls – list directory, similar to dir on windows. example: ls /etc, use ls -l /etc to see more detail

4. cp – copy a file or directory, example: cp source dest if you want to copy a directory use the -R option for recursive: cp -R /source /dest

5. mv – move a file, example: mv source dest

6. rm – remove a file, example: rm somefile to remove a directory you may need the -R option, you can also use the -f option which tells it not to confirm each file: rm -Rf /dir

7. cat - concatenate, or output a file cat /var/log/messages

8. more – outputs one page of a file and pauses. example: more /var/log/messages press q to exit before getting to the bottom. You can also pipe to more | more from other commands, for example ls -l /etc | more

9. scp – secure copy, copies a file over SSH to another server. example: scp /local/file user@host.com:/path/to/save/file

10. tar – tape archiver, tar takes a bunch of files, and munges them into one .tar file, the files are often compressed with the gzip algorithm, and use the .tar.gz extension. to create a tar tar -cf archive.tar /directory, then to extract the archive to the current directory run tar -xf archive.tar to use gzip, just add a z to the options, to create a tar.gz: tar -czf archive.tar.gz /dir to extract it tar -xzf archive.tar.gz

11. grep – pattern matcher, grep takes a regular expression, or to match a simple string you can use fast grep, fgrep failure /var/log/messages, I’m usually just looking for a simple pattern so I tend to use fgrep more than regular grep.

12. find – lists files and directories recursively on a single line, I usually pipe grep into the mix when I use find, eg: find / | fgrep log

13. tail – prints the last few lines of a file, this is handy for checking log files tail /var/log/messages if you need see more lines, use the -n option, tail -n 50 /var/log/messages you can also use the -f option, which will continuously show you the end of the file as things are added to it (very handy for watching logs) tail -f /var/log/messages

14. head – same as tail, but shows the first few lines the file

15. vi – text editor, there are several text editors such as emacs, and nano, but vi is usually installed on any server so its a good one to learn. To edit a file type vi file to edit a line press Esc i then to save changes and exit use Esc wq, or to quit without saving use Esc q!. There are a million other commands, but that will enable you to edit files at a basic level.

Once you learn these commands, and are comfortable with them, you shouldn’t stop there, there are lots of other commands that can make your life easier.

Did I miss any commands that you think are essential to using a UNIX based operating system?

*Originally published at Pete Freitag’s Homepage

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Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and
web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the
HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete
published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.

Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes
in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.

I now know some of the more handy features thanks to the VI reference in forth edition of Unix in a Nutshell which was just released in October.

The reason I think vi is an important editor to learn is that it is typically installed on any unix system (including Mac OSX) by default. Other unix text editors such as emacs aren’t installed by default as often.

Basic VI features (beginners only)

Using vi is pretty easy if you know a few things about it, if you don’t you probably won’t even be able to edit or save a file. Lets start by editing a file /tmp/somefile

vi /tmp/somefileVi starts up in command mode, you can give VI commands to run such as delete this line, search for this, etc.

To start we want to give the insert command so hit i, you should see — INSERT — at the bottom of the screen. Go ahead and write a haiku or something.

Now to save it you need to go back into command mode this is done by hitting ESC now type wq (this means write and quit).

Ok that’s the basics you can get pretty far just knowing that.

Handy Features in VI

Here’s a list of some of the commands that I have found to be quite handy:

• Search :/pattern – search for pattern in the file. This can be a regular expression. Hit n to go to the next match.
• Find and Replace :s/find/replace/g
• Go to End of Line $
• Beginning of Line ^
• Last line in the file L
• Middle of the file M
• Top of the file (Home) – H
• Go to line 10 :10
• Delete current line dd
• Copy or yank a line Y – you can use 5Y to copy 5 lines. Also try yG, and y$.
• Paste p
• Undo u
• Redo Ctrl+R

Have any other handy vi tips? post them in the comments.

Comments

*Originally published at Pete Freitag’s Homepage

Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and
web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the
HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete
published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.

Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes
in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.

He also made a prediction regarding the effect of Apple’s Unix on the future of Linux.

The answer to the first question, however, is that Linux will become “the de facto choice for embedded solutions,” according to Yager’s article. “I believe Big Software vendors such as IBM and Oracle will use Linux to give unwieldy enterprise solutions the George Jetson treatment: Push a button, you’ve got an enterprise database, configured, loaded with sample data and listening for connections.”

That makes it sound like Linux has a fairly bright future ahead of it. Another forecast within the same article made things sound less certain, though.

“Apple’s Unix – or who knows what it’ll be called by then – will overtake commercial Linux in rate of revenue growth by the end of 2007,” Yager wrote.

“By mid-2008, Apple’s sales of systems with factory-installed Apple Unix will exceed the total combined sales of x86 systems factory-shipped with commercial Linux,” he continued. “At the end of the decade, we’ll find that Apple Unix has overtaken commercial Linux as the second most popular general client and server computing platform behind Windows.”

Yager then qualified his statements so as not to upset Linux followers.

“Understand what I’m saying: Apple isn’t going to win or even wage a religious war with Linux,” he wrote. “There will be more money than ever to be made with Linux, but sales won’t derive from a model fashioned to compete with Windows and OS X. Microsoft and Apple will be the top-seeded fighters in general client and server computing platforms. Linux doesn’t need or want to be the third man in that ring.”

Yager then made a request: “don’t get rankled by my prediction that Linux is going underground. It will thrive there.”

Given that the starting question was “where will Linux thrive?” Linux fans can be proud that its success was considered inevitable.

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The list of platforms Centrify said it can offer Microsoft Active Directory control for reads like a list of operating systems most likely to make executives in Redmond lose some sleep.

DirectControl Suite integrates a myriad collection of platforms, as well as middleware servers like IBM’s WebSphere and BEA’s WebLogic, with Active Directory. The product allows heterogenous IT hardware setups to consolidate access control and identity management.

According to Centrify, DirectControl lets those non-Microsoft platforms actively participate as part of a Microsoft domain with Active Directory. The company described the process in a statement about the product:

Centrify DirectControl for VMware ESX Server 3, SUSE Linux 10.1 and SGI IRIX 6.5.22+ are available now. Support for Solaris 10 on x64/x86, Red Hat Fedora Core 5, WebLogic 9.1, and WebSphere 6.1 will be available in September 2006. HP Tru64 UNIX support will begin beta in October 2006.

Microsoft noted on its website that Active Directory can benefit small- and medium-sized businesses just as it can a larger enterprise. Among the enhanced productivity and lower IT headache bullet points, Microsoft said Active Directory can provide better security through its management of access control.

Those who may be considering Active Directory should also consider the ongoing issues with Limited User Accounts (LUA). Aaron Margosis with Microsoft Consulting Services posted information on LUA bugs and the process for fixing some of them in an existing Active Directory installation.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The first thing was to download the sources for the SIMH emulator. Create a directory, unzip the sources, “mkdir BIN” and then just do a “make all”. Don’t neglect the “mkdir BIN”; you need that. This took a fair amount of time on my MacBook Pro – you could just make the actual emulators you want, but that can sometimes be hard to figure out.

Doing this compiles without networking support. If you must have that (I see no reason for the messing around I’m doing), you apparently need libpcap; I assume the one from DarwinPorts will do, but I didn’t try it.

I started with Unix System 5 from the Software Kits page. Create a directory for that, unzip the Unix V5 kit, and copy BIN/pdp11 into it. Finally, create “pdp11.ini” to contain:

set cpu U18
attach rk0 unix_v5_rk.dsk
boot rk0

Now type “./pdp11″. When you see “@” (almost immediately), type “unix”. That will give you a login prompt; root has no password.

Unix V5 is pretty raw stuff. The shell is primitive, no backspace handling, and certainly no command history. It annoyingly uses “chdir” rather than “cd”. I fixed that by finding the source (/usr/source/s2/sh.c) and copying it to “mysh.c”. I then did “ed mysh.c”.

Amazingly enough, I remembered enough “ed” to do what I wanted:

# cp sh.c mysh.c
# ed mysh.c
11135
/chdir/p
if(equal(cp1, "chdir")) {
s/chdir/cd/p
if(equal(cp1, "cd")) {
w
11132
q

I then did “cc mysh.c;cp a.out /bin/mysh;/bin/mysh”. I could now at least use “cd”.

But there’s not much else you can do. There are no man pages, so the only way to figure out how commands work is to paw through the source. As most of the source is charmingly simple, that’s not a great hardship, but you probably won’t spend a great deal of time here without frustration (unless you are old enough to have used this and have a better memory than I).

Exit the simulator with CTRL-E and “quit”. I next downloaded the Unix V7 kit, which requires the “id32″ emulator. My “id32.ini” file contains (as per iu7_readme.txt):

set ttp ena
set pas dev=12
att -e dp0 iu7_dp0.dsk
att -e dp1 iu7_dp1.dsk
boot dp0

Type “dsk(1,0)unix” at the Boot: prompt, do CTRL-D at the single-user prompt, and then login as “root” with password “root”, and you have something a little more like a modern Unix system. No, I’m kidding. Yes, at least there are man pages (though they just spill out on the screen and there is no “more” to pipe them to). There is still not much else: it’s still “ed” and this time the source for commands is not installed. If you are old enough to have used Tandy Model 16 Xenix, you’ll see that this isn’t all that far removed from that. The minimalist /etc/rc contains only 14 lines; it uses /etc/ttys and not inittab.

My, we have come a long way, haven’t we?

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Some hosts even offer a choice of the two operating systems. What are the differences and which one is better?

First of all, when choosing a host, it doesn’t matter what kind of operating system you develop your web site on or what you use on your own computer. Web sites hosted on both UNIX and Windows servers are universally accessible because the data they serve is identical. The difference lies solely in the software used to serve that data.

In terms of reliability UNIX systems have a slight advantage. They are known to be extremely stable and able to run for years without rebooting. Windows is also very reliable – slightly less so than UNIX but still able to handle the demands of modern web sites.

The majority of web hosts use various flavours of UNIX like Linux and FreeBSD. These operating systems are free and reduce the costs of a hosting operation. Windows costs thousands of dollars so some hosts charge extra for Windows accounts if they offer both types.

As well as being free, Linux and the other UNIX varieties are open-source software. Anyone can alter the source code and make improvements, updates, and additions. There is a large pool of dedicated enthusiasts who use their free time to work on this software. Windows, on the other hand, is Microsoft proprietary software so users are dependent on Microsoft to release updates. There is no way for an individual user to modify the code.

The main difference between the two types of operating systems is the type of software each can run. Windows is suitable for Microsoft products such as MS Access databases, ASP for delivering dynamic content, and VBScript for site enhancements. UNIX cannot accommodate these technologies so if you absolutely need ASP or VBScript you should pick a Windows host. UNIX hosts deliver dynamic content by using software such as PHP, CGI, and MySQL – technologies which are also available on Windows hosts.

Windows is necessary for hosting Windows media files such as videos and audio. Other types of media such as MP3, Flash, Shockwave and Real can be handled by either UNIX or Windows. Websites created in Microsoft FrontPage (a graphical HTML development package) can also be hosted on either type as long as MS databases or dynamic content are not included for use on a UNIX host.

Which is Best?

Before deciding which type of hosting to use for your website, consider carefully what kind of technologies you will need. Do you need a dynamic site? Will you have multimedia content such as streaming video or audio?

Both UNIX and Windows can provide dynamic content with PHP, MySQL, as well as CGI, and there are thousands of dynamic scripts readily available. Multimedia can also be hosted by either type of server, although Windows media (WMA and WMV) need to be hosted on a Windows server.

If you absolutely need Microsoft databases, ASP, and Windows media you have to go with a Windows host. Otherwise most websites are probably better off with a UNIX host. The advantages of UNIX over Windows include greater choices in web hosts, slightly better reliability, and (sometimes) cheaper hosting costs.

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