Migration launching advice grows wiser
February 13, 2009
Even now, in 2009, 3000 users are just starting migrations. Set aside for a moment the fact that HP miscalculated the migration span so badly for the 3000. Companies are learning Unix in a new era than in 2003. The good fortune of starting this year is there's a richer range of materials to study, some online, some on paper.
Texas Iron Works (TIW), a 90-year-old company supporting oil and gas exploration, "is in the beginning stages of migrating from MPE to HP-UX," said system admin Bobby Brogdon. He was looking for a cross reference guide between the two environments. HP just pulled down one of the best such resources when it shut off the Jazz server. While the community awaits the resurrection of the HP guide at places like Speedware and OpenMPE, there's other guidance.
Roy Brown pointed to the Robelle white paper on the Web that covers the subject. And in an example of the everlasting gift of the Web, a posting from the late Wirt Atmar still recommends a book about Linux.
The Linux book delivers information relevant to HP's Unix, since as Wirt says, all computers are alike. The paper guide has earned a spot on a dozen desktops at the company founded by Wirt and his partner Valerie, AICS Research.
The advantage of the Linux in a Nutshell book is that the index at the back of the book is in plain English. It is a listing of all of the kinds of things that you want to do on any computer, print, copy files, etc., and quickly points you to often suprisingly oddly-named Unix command.
I still haven’t memorized all of the names of commands that I use, which is only a fraction of those available. To compensate, we’ve purchased about of dozen copies of the O’Reilly book so that they’re on every desk for quick reference and never more than an arm’s length away.
Shawn Gordon, the former 3000 NewsWire columnist and developer of 3000 utilities, reminded Brogdon that he wrote a paper which compared commands between MPE and Unix, and he even threw in MPEX. David Waroff cast a vote for Learning the Unix Operating System which he said is "a short, pragmatic introduction to Unix."
Finally, for anyone who's leaving the 3000 in a forced march and wants to know what to watch out for in the new world of Unix, Mark Landin reminded 3000 migrators of the ubiquitous and funny "Unix Hater's Handbook." It's such an icon that it can be read online as a PDF file; it's gone out of print.