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From: Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu>
Subject: Re: Database engines on bsd
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 1995 01:16:00 GMT
Message-ID: <D3GBIp.9Iy@park.uvsc.edu>
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salim@tss.com (Salim Ali) wrote:
]
] This may be an FAQ; anyway, here goes ..
]
] Are there any Database engines (free or otherwise) available on
] bsd?
]
] Email if you can or post, if you must.
I must post because the answer is of general interest. 8-).
Most of the freely available databases (a list of which is
posted to comp.os.386bsd.announce on a monthly basis) compile and
run without changes.
Commercial database toolkits for which source is provided will
typically do so as well, especially if they already compile on the
good versions of SunOS (4.x).
Several binary database products that run on SCO or AT&T SVR3/SVR4
will also run on FreeBSD, including FoxBASE, Oracle, and Sybase,
with the caveat that most of them use sockets for IPC, so you will
need to add a /dev/socket for them to function (I have personally
run SVR3 Sybase this way with two client machines, a NeST and an
AT&T StarServer). There is not any /dev/socket support built
into FreeBSD's IBCS2 environment, so you will have to provide it
yourself; I hacked the Linux /dev/socket code, but since it is
GPL'ed instead of LGPL'ed, it is unsuitable as a kernel module and
I have no interest whatsoever in giving the code to anyone else,
since I feel it will discourage the production of a free version.
If you are interested in hacking the Linux code yourself, it's about
a two day ordeal on a fast machine.
The other caveat of IBCS2 code is that none of the free OS's have
install tools capable of handling the distribution formats that
these things come in, so you are pretty much left with installing
them on the machine they were supposed to go on, then backing them
off and back on to install. I had a little trouble installing
Microsoft Word, and a *lot* of trouble installing Lotus 123, since
Lotus embeds the machine name in the license file. I finally ended
up writing a little tool to hack Lotus license files to get it on
to several machines (each machine had a legal license, it was just
an big install pain otherwise).
In general, I would recommend using a source level product, or
waiting a little while for alternate ABI support to ripen (this is
true of Linux as well as FreeBSD).
NetBSD is said to have an IBCS2 snapshot abailable as well in their
current release. Not having tried it, I can't venture an opinion
other than it couldn't hurt for someone (like you?) to try it and
tell us about it.
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.