20 Years Domino on Linux
Daniel Nashed – 31 December 2019 10:14:30
The end of the year is always a good time to look back.
You might now that I am looking into Domino on UNIX for quite some time.
But I just ran into an old CD looking for something else when I realized that we have Domino on Linux now for 20 years!
Linux changed the IT world
I think Linux changed the IT world dramatically! Without Linux, which also made open source popular, we might not be where we are today. Linux is running the Internet.
And I am pretty sure the IT world look completely different without Linux today!
It is a remarkable and outstanding effort Linus Torvalds did at that time and does today!
Linux is everywhere and even Microsoft is looking into implementing Linux technology in their products and releases software for Linux (for example the SQL server which is even available as a Docker container).
Last week I got a link on Facebook to Linus Torvalds Master of Science Thesis (see link).
And I found two interesting videos (linked below), which might be interesting to look into ..
In combination of finding this old first Domino on Linux disk, this lead to this blog post ..
-- Daniel
My first contact with Linux
When I started in IT in 1990 after school there wasn't any Linux in the commercial world.
At that time I worked with TeX instead of Word which I downloaded at the university in Düsseldorf, where a friend studied mathematics and IT.
We got Linux and TeX from the internet (downloaded via FTP to floppy disks) and I wrote all my papers with TeX instead of office (actually I should look into this again today ).
I have been using TeX (a very special digital typographical systems) on Windows with the at that time famous emTeX implementation.
And I looked also into Linux as a operating system for fun for education purposes and fun.
HP-UX my first commercial contact with UNIX on Domino
The first Notes production environment I set up was running on version 4 on HP-UX.
There have been just a handful of installations in Europe from what I recall -- even HP moved to Windows NT instead of HP-UX.
My first production environment was a jointed effort with Spanish guy, who was working for Lotus Professional services in the UNIX competence center in Paris, visiting me in Essen (Germany) to install our production environment.
We had a lot of fun installing this first server and he was the first one I could sync up with about Notes on UNIX.
At that time the first UNIX start script was born. Which I later on adopted also to Solaris and AIX. And finally years later for Linux.
Domino on Linux
When I started with Notes around 1995, Linux wasn't used in the commercial world.
For me this changed end of 1999 when IBM started to look into Linux (actually one of the developer ported it already earlier at home as a skunkworks).
The first versions Domino on Linux wasn't very scalable due to some kernel resource limitations.
We needed one lightweight process for each users, because we had no pthreads yet and also no sys-epoll implementation.
Later on Linux 64 became one of the most popular Domino platforms beside Windows 64. And it is very scalable.
Domino was early on running on Linux and I have been always a big fan for Domino on Linux.
25 years of Linux in 5 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTIc5frqw8
TED - The mind behind Linux | Linus Torvalds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8NPllzkFhE
Linux: a Portable Operating System
Master of Science Thesis
Linus Torvalds, Helsinki January 31, 1997
https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf
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