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Caldera

Hummingbird, Caldera announce alliance 41

Posted by Hemos from the working-together dept.
Daveguy wrote to us with the news about Hummingbird has entered into a relationship with Caldera for both marketing and strategic development. Very cool-Hummingbird is going to be working with them on Exceed; HostExplorer; NFS Maestro Server, NFS Maestro Client, NFS Maestro Gateway and NFS Maestro Solo, all for more support Linux.
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Hummingbird, Caldera announce alliance More

Hummingbird, Caldera announce alliance

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  • Don't forget the other fundamental problem with VNC. It only uses clear text passwords. Who needs security eh?

    As for resolution - over a 56k dialup or parts of the office 10Mb LAN I'm running it at resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768 quite happily - try dropping the colour depth or playing with the encoding methods - they do make a difference. HTH.
  • There are several printer drivers like that available for a variety of purposes (none of them free/open source AFAIK, though).

    Also, you can simply print from Windows to a Linux Samba server and tell Windows that it is a PostScript printer. That way, there is nothing at all to install. On the Linux side, you can convert to PDF.

  • I'm not talking local apps, linux is fine for that. But for runing X GUI apps on a remote computer Hummingbird eXcels. This is from actual experience. I've tried SUSE, RH5.x and RH6.0, FreeBSD 2.x and 3.0. on a wide range of hardware platforms (486 to PII). For running our (2D) GIS located remotely on our SGI Origin 2000, None of the above compare to eXceed on NT on similar hardware. What platforms have YOU tested, and what type of Apps do you run remotely????? motjuste@hotmail.com

    Mostly XEmacs, but sometimes all kinds of Motif and GTK applications. Remote boxes are Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD.

    Is it over local network or over some slow high-latency WAN? If local, something should be wrong with network configuration or hardware or poorly supported network card -- I have never seen significant speed decrease in properly configured network. Or you have Linux box placed behind a slow router. Or you managed to eat the network bandwidth with huge amount of trafic over NFS. Or you managed to configure 100BaseT card in Linux box as 10BaseT -- some old Vortex and other drivers don't recognize fast Ethernet when used with new cards, I have seen this problem at my home network. If the network is "remote" and slow or high-latency, you probably have forgot to enable lbxproxy or ssh X compression on Linux.

  • That's if you aren't one of the (typically non-developers) who are being axed.

    I also was acquired by Hummingbird. I eventually quit for a better job with more pay.

    Good luck though.
  • I too believe Exceed is a good product.

    But I too worked at Hummingbird. And I do not believe it is an excellent company. I eventually quit for greener pastures.
  • My guess is not likely. The Digital Paper Hummingbird acquired is not allowed to be used within the company (I know this because I tried). My personal theory is that it is being packaged for sale.

    [Disclaimer: I worked at Hummingbird. I am not under NDA.]
  • What can Hummingbird offer?

    NFS: Samba has this beat hand's down.
    XWindows Server: I'll stick with VNC.
    Telnet: Haha
    A Name: Hummingbird is well known in IT Shops

    I guess they have a name to offer...

  • I can't imagine what kind of technology this could produce. Exceed already connects to Linux boxes (it's just X-Windows, after all). I always figured Linux would make products like Exceed redundant, since I can load Linux on my PC and get an X-Server for free.

    I'm guessing this is just some sort of marketting alliance. Maybe Caldera will start distributing Exceed or something like that.

  • Hmm. I remember read directions for this somewhere, but can't remember now. Some web searching might help you.

    Until then, you can start x with the command "X -query " to get a graphical login screen on a remote system. I sometimes use this at school.

    On the question of using linux to serve up such a screen, try "man xdm" - I think that covers it.

    Tim

  • ..almost totally unrelated to this article.

    As you said, any Linux box is actually an X server. I can easily display an application running on a certain host, on the display of a linux host. (setting display and xhost) BUT what I miss very much is a chooser that would list all XDMCP broadcasting hosts. Then I take on host from the list, get a graphical (XDM) login screen, and after logging in I get the whole desktop.
    I know how to do this with Exceed or ReflectionX, but how do I setup Linux to act like this? And how do I setup Linux to broadcast XDMCP packets to other X servers?

    I asked quite many "UNIX guru"s and none gave me a satisfactory answer, maybe Slashdotters would know. Many thanks in advance.

  • Well, in case you hadn't noticed, NFS is pretty poor in Linux - probably the worst implementation of all the well known *nixes.

    So, I guess it could use any help that's going.

    Yes, it's true that hummingbird make mainly windows software that is agnostic as to the particular kind of unix that it is interfacing. However, Hummingbird make very good software - top quality - and I'm sure their interest in Linux can only be for the good.

  • This is very, very odd. You definitely severely misconfigured something on Linux box if it manages to run XF86 slower than Exceed.
  • Hummingbird makes an NFS client for Windows. I don't think they'll be much help for Linux's rather ... problematic ... NFS implementation, except maybe cooperating with it a little better.
    ---
  • Hummingbird makes NFS clients and X-servers for Windows. Linux already has NFS clients and X-servers built in for free... which is quite a bit cheaper than $300/seat/product (the pricing of one license of Exceed 6.1 as of two weeks ago.)

    The only good thing I can see coming out of all of this is that the resulting marketing campaign will perhaps make clueless Windows IT managers and sysadmins more aware of the choices they have for Windows clients connecting to linux servers, but if they're that clueless, maybe they should find a different career. :)

    Hummingbird and Caldera are just trying to get more press time.

  • Yes, it's a great product. But it costs nearly $200 for one license. :( Unless your company is paying the bill, or you're richer than I am, you might be better off just using linux, which has built-in, free NFS support. :)
  • Not only is the X server not that great,
    in that it will mis-size windows, get colours
    wrong that work fine on the console of a real
    unix box but their NFS server had some problems
    too.

    Like if you re-inited the NFS server all the
    clients would have to reboot or disconnect/
    reconnect the share to get it to work again.

    I suppose it's better than nothing, but it is very pricey.
  • Gotta agree with the above posters. Dump GDM, use KDM. GDM claims to support broadcast queries, but damned if I could get it to work.

    Also, I found the XDM man pages totally incomprehensible (no, I'm not a newbie. They really are totally incomprehensible!). I have to say, just set up KDM, run the kdmconfig (or whatever the command is) program, and you're on your way.

    Oh yeah, this is a wee bit out of date, but if you want to go it the old fashioned way, here's a page [linuxgazette.com] you should look at. This is certainly a great way to get use out of old boxes. I have a P75 that I use for just this purpose. It runs the whole desktop and all it's apps off my workstation. Very nice.
    ----------------------
    "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

  • On Linux I can print documents to a postscript file, convert ps to pdf, and make the pdf file available on the Internet.

    Humminbird software I was testing 2 years ago, simulated a printer driver that was automaticaly converting a printed document to the DigitalPaper [hummingbird.com] format.

    Can Hummingbird make similar software that enables (Windows) users to print to the "virtual" printer that automaticaly:

    convert printed document to XML or PDF

    post/upload it to a specified location on a selected Internet/Intranet server?

  • you guys gave me exactly the info I need!
  • Yes:
    X -query foo.bar.com
    will bring up a login on foo.bar.com. IIRC, the way to get behavior most like the X servers for PCs/MACs is
    X -broadcast
    This will present the user with a list of machines on the subnet which allow remote login.
  • I am not so qualified on the Linux side of the fence in terms of NFS, X-Servers, etc., but I used Exceed in a previous assignment, and let me tell you, it saved several projects from going down the tubes. In fact, when the NT client software failed (which it did on regular occasions, we used Exceed (on NT machines and Win95 machines) to prove that the problem wasn't in the database or middleware layers.

    My thoughts are that this is a very positive direction for Caldera to pursue in terms of gaining "brain trust", with the addenda that I hope that this results in more code for the rest of us to use, and not just a locked proprietary solution.

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