[CentOS-devel] An introduction and a s390 effort

Sascha Thomas Spreitzer wrote:
> Hello contributors and OSS friends,
> 
> (Who am I?)
> My name is Sascha Thomas Spreitzer and I live in the eastern outback
> of Munich in Bavaria Germany.
> I am 23 years old and started with C and GNU Linux in the early age of 13.
> 
> (What am I doing?)
> Most time I spend in the office fixing Unix dependant problems. Since
> now at Germanys biggest stock broker "Baader Bank".
> In future (starting first of April) ill design and realize AIX and
> z/Linux environments for the government insurance sector.
> If I'm not in the office, I go out with my girlfriend Lisa and we
> enjoy the little time we have together.
> I used to do traditional Shotokan Karate in JKA style. But stopped it
> a year ago, because I had no time left to do it.
> In holidays I try to gain progress with my software development skills.
> 
> (Why centos and what I'm up to?)
> I had a chance to get a look at IBM's z/Series in the past and it
> arouse my interest. Some years passed and now I have to face z/Linux
> in my new position.
>>From the skills I gained in the past and the skills i'll gain in
> future, I want to contribute back to the community.

Since you mention IBM's mainframes, I assume you want to work in that 
sort of environment.

CentOS4 is available for zSeries, CentOS5 is not. If you want to try 
porting CentOS5 to zSeries, there have been at least two others. If you 
search the CentOS list's archives you should be able to find them and 
see where they're up to.

If you want your own personal mainframe, but without the expense, 
download Hercules. It's capable of emulating IBM System/360 computers 
and their descendants right up to the zSeries. Hercules hosted on a good 
multi-core PC running CentOS or Fedora should do a pretty good job of 
running it.

I used to work with these:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3168.html
One of the cute features of the "New optional 3068 Multisystem 
Communication Unit to link two of the new Model 168s for a tightly 
coupled multiprocessing system of up to 16 megabytes of processor 
storage." was the ability to decouple the two CPUs and turn one computer 
into two, without restarting the operating system.

They used to run OS/VS2 MVS: MVS running in Hercules on a Pentium II is 
probably faster!





-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)