Is Tru64 UNIX
an open source/free or commercial system? Does it work on 32-bit platform? and what are its features in compare with *BSD
& Linux
system?
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1Try en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_Unix to start with. – user Jan 12 '12 at 8:03
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1@MichaelKjörling: tried it before, my English is not so good. I did not understand it very well, because of that I came here to ask. – Adban Jan 12 '12 at 8:04
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Here you get answers in english, so not much different from wikipedia. You can try Google translation services. – enzotib Jan 12 '12 at 8:47
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3@enzotib: Simple english is better than machine translation. – Adban Jan 12 '12 at 9:00
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2@Adban: There is a Simple English Wikipedia site. There isn't a Simple English page for Tru64 UNIX, but you might find the site useful in the future. – user26112 Aug 3 '13 at 1:05
It is HP's commercial 64-bit UNIX operating system (based on the Mach kernel - which Mac OS X is also based on)
It is for the Alpha instruction set architecture only - although there was a short lived Intel port.
Broadly speaking, usage is similar to many other *nixes, but the location of various config files, executables etc may be not where you expect.
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Actually it is one of HP's UNIXes (the other being HP-UX). – user14755 May 16 '17 at 6:39
Tru64 is a commercial Unix system. It wass originally called OSF/1, OSF standing for Open Software Foundation. It is original in that it is neither based on AT&T source code (System V) nor on BSD, the two major Unix flavor. The OSF was led by DEC as an attempt to compete against System V which they felt excluded companies other than AT&T and Sun.
Only DEC made significant use of OSF/1. DEC's OSF/1 was known as Digital Unix (from Digital Equipment Corporation, and it was the operating system shipped with most of DEC's workstations (there was aslo a version of Windows NT for some low-to-mid-end Alphas). first based on MIPS processors (32-bit), then later on Alpha. Because Alphas were at the time the only affordable 64-bit platforms (not as cheap as a PC, but cheaper than “big iron”), and as part of the rebranding of DEC products after Compaq bought DEC in 1998.
In 2002, Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq. HP had its own 64-bit platforms (the traditional PA-RISC, the new high-end Itanium and more recently the cheaper AMD64) and its own Unix brand (HP-UX) plus Linux, so it had no use for either Alpha or OSF/1.
While OSF/1 did have innovative features at the time it was developped, none were licensed for reuse in other systems, as far as I know. Nowadays I think any worthwhile feature has been imitated by others already. HP has not released the OSF/1 intellectual property, except for a version of the AdvFS filesystem.
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DG was Data General. Definitely not the same as DEC!! Also, HP (or Compaq) licensed Tru64's cluster software to Oracle for db clustering. – RonJohn May 15 '17 at 23:53
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1Actually, most of the command and utilities were either BSD or AT&T licensed and were ported to the Alpha platform from the Ultrix platform. Some items such as
ncurses
andnawk
were directly licensed from USL. – fpmurphy May 16 '17 at 0:17 -
1It would be more factual to state that only DEC made use of the Mach kernel. Other components of OSF/1 such as CDE, Motif, DCE, and liots more, were used by many companies. – fpmurphy May 16 '17 at 0:24
As per the above Wikipedia article Tru64 UNIX
is a commercial system and it works only on the DEC Alpha
platform.