Is there anything interesting one can do with A/UX?

[moosefuel]

I was thinking of giving A/UX a go on my SE/30, but I wonder if, beyond the fun of installing new software, there is any reason to use A/UX? Is there anything cool to try? I'm proficient in modern-day *nixes for hosting web servers, etc, but what can you do with Apple's offereing?

 

[cheesestraws]

It's not useful, but it is interesting. Some of the UI around the Mac/UNIX interaction is very different than they later went with with OS X: some of it better (Commando is one of the big missed opportunities), some of it worse (HFS volumes vs. UNIX volumes is a bit ... peculiar).

From the UNIX side of things, it's just an old UNIX, and there's not a huge amount special about it.

From the Mac side of things, I do find the ability for each user to have their own System Folder to be nearly useful, my own installation has a number of accounts with different sets of extensions, for example. But that's not very useful. And the potential of the hybrid toolbox is kind of cool. But, again, never really materialised beyond a few applications.

But there's no real reason to run it beyond a modern UNIX, and unless you're ready to treat it as a security nightmare waiting to happen, it's perhaps best avoided as anything other than a desktop OS.

 

[MacKilRoy]

It’s about as useful as Mac OS X Server 1.0 Rhapsody was.

It’s a trip through a time machine, to use a little-known OS, to do a few things you couldn’t do in other OS versions at the time (at least on a Mac anyways).

It’s more for the adventurous type who like to play around with operating systems.

 

[Unknown_K]

I only use it on my AWS95. It works great for a file sharing server (faster than any other 68k mac) and the built in UNIX version of Retrospect makes backups easy enough. X11 is interesting to play with but I never did much with it (same with Desqview/X on the PC side).

Not sure I would worry about some hacker trying to exploit an A/UX machine these days.

 

[moosefuel]

Thanks for the feedback. I feel just from these descriptions that I’ve lived the A/UX experience vicariously, so I guess there’s no reason to install it, unless I decide I want to waste several hours to be able to say, “well that’s neat.”

Thanks.

 

[tecneeq]

If you want to run modern stuff, there is NetBSD and it's packaged stuff. Sure, you will not be able to run LibreOffice or a modern Browser (because of memory mainly), but there are lots of applications that should still be useful.
From netatalk-2.2 (in pkgsrc) to nethack. The problem is of course energy usage, i pay 0.5€ per kWh so keeping a SE/30 running as a mailserver is a bit costly.