SCO's UnixWare measures up with open source additions

With the newest release of The SCO Group's UnixWare, it could be said that this variety of Unix is starting to look a lot more like Linux - even if SCO lawyers pulled the Linux Kernel Personality modules from the operating system during the course of our testing last month.

We tested UnixWare 7.1.4 with both new management components and added open source applications  to compare it with Linux and Apple OS/X operating systems we've tested recently.

The results were mixed. UnixWare did well in our Web connectivity and performance tests, but wasn't as advanced as its Linux rivals in terms of its GUI and hardware discovery facilities.

Up to running

We installed the Enterprise Edition of UnixWare on four different server platforms. The initial installation was primitive compared with UnixWare's Linux rivals SuSE and Mandrake. No installation GUI was invoked, just colored text graphics. Hardware detection also seemed a difficult task for UnixWare. As an example, UnixWare could not correctly find a KVM-attached mouse. To bring up the first instance of the operating system, we had to plug a mouse directly to each server.

A common platform, the HP/Compaq DL360G3 server presented other problems for the installation application, which consistently could not find the CD-ROM drive on the server midway through installation. SCO support advised a boot-time toggle that let the drive successfully work through installation; however, installation time slowed to a crawl - more than 90 minutes per CD installed. The installation program found multi-CPU configurations correctly and offered optimization options for the multi-CPU chipsets it found.

We subsequently downloaded the operating system to other servers using the "TCP" (actually PXE server) installation option that immensely speeds up installation to multiple servers.

The SCO Update service (not tested, as no updates had been issued at the time we tested) connects to the host for updates from the mothership.

Installation options are plentiful. Two popular versions of Apache are available - 1.3 and 2.0.49. We tested the latter of the Apache Web services (including Apache Tomcat). Other open source applications are available, such as Samba 3.0.3, which provides connectivity to Windows directory services. Also available is SCO's older Advanced File and Print Services that support pre-Windows 2000, DOS-based Windows clients.