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SCO UNIX and BSD/OS

SCO UNIX and BSD/OS are the two most popular commercially available UNIX versions for the Intel platform. The Santa Cruz Operation's SCO UNIX started as a Xenix operating system and was developed and upgraded to the current release called OpenDesktop and OpenServer. These latest releases have graphical user interfaces that prove more friendly than the traditional character-based UNIX operating systems. But don't despair; they are still rooted in the UNIX core and still support character-based commands and use, as shown in Figure 7.2. There are many potential users of these operating systems, from the smallest intranet to the most advanced. The typical user is the organization that wants to make the most of its hardware dollars. A bare-bones UNIX will run well on an Intel 386 machine, and you will be surprised at the performance. If your plan is to run a simple Web server and mail for fewer than 20 users, you should have no problem with the performance of a 386, assuming you have at least 12 to 16MB of RAM.

Figure 7.2: There are many graphical variants of UNIX, but the base of UNIX is still the character-based environment.

By the same token, if you have a very busy intranet site serving mail to 100 or more users but don't want to bear the added expense of the hardware, software, and administration of using a Sun or SGI minicomputer, you can squeeze more performance out of a Pentium machine running UNIX than one running Windows 95 or Windows NT. Some intranet developers might want to use UNIX because it provides users with some of the Internet features not available with Windows and MacOS servers. Finger, plan, and vacation mail are standard UNIX features you won't see with many operating systems. Also, UNIX allows for users to have a shell account on the server and server space. If you want your mail to reside on the server and users to read it directly from there, UNIX is the only way to go.

Another nice thing about UNIX is that it is the only operating system that can run on almost any computer. Say you build your intranet on a 386, need to expand to a 486 or Pentium the following year, need to upgrade to a DEC Alpha to handle the traffic the next year, and then possibly a SPARC Ultra. You will have no problem picking the site off one machine and plunking it down on the next.

BSD/OS has seen increasing growth since releasing its product in 1993. BSD, developed by Berkeley Software Design, is based on variations made to the UNIX operating system by students and staff at the University of California. The variations are mostly to the user shell and some functionality; you probably won't notice the difference between versions of UNIX unless you are a serious programmer or UNIX specialist. BSD has targeted the Internet and intranet markets and has a product that is now used to support some of the largest and most popular Web sites on the Internet, such as Adobe and Intel. BSD also has released some gateways to allow its servers to interact easily with sites running Novell Netware.

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