“When Linux comes to the iSeries next year, only the newest
multiprocessor boxes running the latest operating system will be
able to run it. The majority of AS/400-iSeries users on older boxes
will remain Linuxless. But is that necessarily a bad
thing?”
“Because the first incarnation of AS/400 Linux requires a
dedicated processor in addition to a primary processor running
OS/400, Linux will only be able to run on boxes with more than one
processor, though Rochester hopes to overcome this restriction in a
later release. In addition, IBM says it has added protective
facilities to the I-Star processor (which is available only in the
8xx models) to prevent the Linux and OS/400 operating systems from
interacting with each other.”
“So is this devastating news for the AS/400 community? Dave
Andrews, president of Andrews Consulting Group, doesn’t think so.
“If you’ve got a perfectly good operating system on your computer,
why have the overhead of putting another one in there?” he asks.
While AS/400 users certainly don’t want to be the only kids on the
block without Linux, offering Linux on the iSeries just won’t have
any impact on the AS/400 community, he says. “Until there’s
software that’s only available under Linux and that hasn’t been
converted to run under OS/400, and until that software is so
compelling and interesting that the AS/400 community feels they
have to have it, there’s nothing to be gained by all this,” Andrews
says.”
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