Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!jclark!jjc From: jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Switching from Sun to HP: some general questions Message-ID: Date: 8 Apr 91 12:38:40 GMT Sender: jjc@jclark.uucp (James Clark) Organization: None, London, England Lines: 114 I've got a Sun Sparcstation 2 on order, and I'm thinking about cancelling it and getting an HP 9000/730 instead. I'm more than a little bit nervous about switching over. Although I'm generally fed up with Sun, I've used their machines for several years, and I know that they provide a reasonably pleasant working environment. I have generally warm feelings towards HP, and I've been very impressed by the responsiveness of individual HP employees in this group, but I really don't know much about HP workstations. So I hope the net will excuse some rather general novice questions. (I know I could probably get answers to some of these from my salesman, but he didn't seem very clued up.) If I get some replies, I'll summarize to this group, since I suspect there are other who have similar concerns to me. If you reply but don't want your remarks to appear in the summary, or want to remain anonymous, please say so and I'll be glad to comply. I've got a lot of questions, but I would like to hear from you even if you want to answer only one of them. First a little bit of background. I work mostly on free software (my project for the last few years has been GNU groff); I write mainly in C++. I also run a uucp node. The things that are important to me are integer preformance, the quality of the available software development tools, the quality of the window system and GUI, and the overall robustness, standards conformance and functionality of the OS. Integer performance is important, but it is by no means everything; floating point performance is unimportant to me. My main concern is about HPUX. My second-hand impression of it is that it's based on some old version of System V, and that it's a bit old-fashioned and non-standard, and generally not quite as good as SunOS. Is this a fair assessment? Does HPUX include DWB? Does HPUX support long filenames, symlinks, job control, sockets, NFS? Is it POSIX compliant? With the 2-user version of HPUX, does a uucp login count as a user? Does a rlogin count as a user? Does uucp work reliably at 19200 bps? Is it a solid version of uucp? Does HPUX provide lpr or does it only provide lp? Does it support PostScript printers? Somebody said that OSF/1 was going to be available by the end of this year. Does this mean that a production version suitable for end users will be available by then? Does this mean HP will be shipping OSF/1 as their standard OS by then? Will OSF/1 run HPUX binaries? Is BSD 4.4 likely to be available? If so, will the machine dependent parts be freely redistributable? If not, does HP document their hardware enough that it would be possible for somebody to port it? How good (fast, robust) is HP's implementation of X? Does it include all of X11R4? Is it reasonably close to X11R4? Does the MIT X11R4 distribution build on a 9000/730? Is the R5 distribution likely to? Do HP document their graphics hardware enough to port a window system? How good is HP hardware and software support? Is it reasonably priced? Can one access support by email? How does HP's 19'' monitor compare to the Trinitron that Sun ships? How about the keyboard and mouse? How noisy/hot would a system with two internal 400Mb disks be? Would it be reasonably pleasant in an office environment? Does it connect directly to thinwire ethernet? Is HP hardware generally reliable? I'm concerned about exchanging data with people who don't have HPs. Can I get a third party SCSI tape that handles Sun-compatible QIC-24 or QIC-150 tapes? My salesman said that 400Mb was the biggest external disk that HP offered on the 730. This seems a bit on the small side. Is HP likely to offer bigger disks, or does it want me to buy a 750 if I need lots of disk space? Can I use third-party SCSI disks? In addition to DAT, I was told there was a writable CD-ROM available (C1701A or something like that). Is this intended as an alternative to DAT as a mass-backup device? I suspect not, since it seems to be slower, have lower capacity, and be more expensive than DAT. Can it mounted like a normal disk, or does one treat it like a tape? Would CD-ROMs written with this drive be readable with Sun's CD-ROM drive? Are gcc and g++ available? If not, do HP provide enough information about their architecture that somebody could port them? If so, is the code quality competitive with HP? How about gdb? What debugging format does HP use? Is it COFF, stabs, or something peculiar to HP? If the last, is it documented? Does HP offer dbx? How reliable is the standard C compiler? Are the higher optimization levels sufficiently reliable to be usable? Is ANSI C included with HPUX or available separately? How good is HP's C++ (Softbench) offering? Is it based on cfront 2.0 or 2.1? How good is the debugger? Is it as good as Saber C++? Is Saber C++ likely to become available? In general, how easy is it to port free software to HPUX? Most things seem to port to SunOS with little effort. To what extent is this true of HPUX? I would also be interested in any other random comments that you might have about the relative merits of Sun and HP workstations. If you've got this far, thanks for bearing with me. This is an important decision to me: any help you can provide really will be appreciated. James Clark jjc@jclark.uucp jjc%jclark@mcsun.eu.net jjc@ai.mit.edu