On Mon, Apr 17, 2000 at 08:54:00AM -0500, John A. Maier wrote:
> 
> > From what I heard from a Linux/AS400 porting project,
> > the AS/400 has no MMU, I guess this could be a problem too.
> 
> They probably had someone on the inside pass them docs under the table...

Actually, they had someone on the inside discouraging them. :-)

> IBM does not like anyone elbowing in on their OS market.  In the long   
> run, IBM make a great portion of their money off of maintenance and OS   
> upgrades etc. for their hardware.  Especially after Bill Gates, they   
> aren't quite so quick to make such a mistake again.

They adopted Linux as yet another OS for the S/390.
Let's see if they open up for other architectures as well.
But then again on the S/390 Linux runs as yet another guest OS under VM,
which makes the platform and VM more attractive, but it makes no sense
for AS/400 customers to run a Unix on their box, as they'd have bought an
RS/6000 if they had wanted to, so IBM probably isn't too excited about any
Unix porting efforts to the AS/400, just like you said.

> I did some searches (yahoo, lycos, and altavista) for an AS/400 Linux   
> port, and didn't find a thing.  So again, just like the Game Boy Linux,   
> I'll believe it when I see it.

It is on
http://users.snip.net/~gbooker/as400.htm
as linked from http://www.linux.org/

The port is just in the planning state and for the old CISC AS/400 only, though.
I don't know if the AS/400 9402 E02 mentioned in the original post is 
RISC or CISC, but I guess since the RISC AS/400 are PowerPC-based they might
be a slightly easier porting target than the OS/400-tailored CISC versions.

Florian