Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s first non-iAPX-86 code will come in the form of Gemini-on-Sparc and Gemini-on-PowerPC implementations, courtesy of ICL Plc and UniSoft Ltd respectively, Unigram reports. Gemini is the merged offering of the next-generation OpenServer (Comet) and UnixWare (Eiger) releases. While ICL’s Sparc implementation of UnixWare 2.0 is almost ready to roll, a PowerPC version won’t see the light of day until the end of next year at the earliest. London-based UniSoft created a prototype implementation of a previous UnixWare release on PowerPC at Novell Inc’s behest, but lack of independent software vendor and OEM interest in a commercial product sent that effort into a holding pattern. Now UniSoft has found an unidentified PowerPC systems builder wanting to offer UnixWare on a 604-based symmetric multiprocessing box, and says it will use the prototype to kick-start development of a UnixWare 2.0.2 for the PowerPC.
