Digital Equipment Corp officially revealed its OSF/1 operating system name change last week. It originally wanted to call it killer compliant 64-bit butt-kickin’ mega-open Digital Unix, but opted for Digital Unix 3.2 instead, it says. The Unix 93-compliant system will win its Unix 95 (Spec 1170) spurs later in the year – Digital Unix 4.0 is also the release that will feature a bundled, default Common Desktop Environment implementation and more high availability features. IXI Ltd’s X.desktop remains the default desktop for now. DEC says it has done a full technical evaluation of putting Common Desktop up on OpenVMS – which also runs X.desktop – and has even moved some bits of it over, according to engineers we spoke to, but the company says it is waiting for demand from customers before it decides whether to go the whole hog. The company is still offering the Habitat layer that gives the OSF/1 code BSD or Unix System V.4 personalities (and it still pays a royalty for it), but says it is not selling a lot of Habitat now that most System V.4 application programming interfaces are in the core operating system via its Spec 1170 work in any case. Apparently it is only the few and far betweenies that want an operating system on the desktop who are still taking up the Habitat option.
