Word has it that an unlikely combination of forces have come together in a bid to establish a new standard for installing Unix software from graphical user interfaces, and will be showing their stuff next month’s UniForum show in San Francisco. Partners in the effort are thought to include at least Hewlett-Packard Co, IXI Ltd, Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc with IBM Corp said to be considering its position. The standard is tipped to provide a standard set of techniques for independent software vendors to write to and should enable users to get Unix applications up and running from an install icon within a variety of graphical environments without the need to go back down to the shell, be they native or guest implementations. Some of the stuff in the specification will be new, some is already in use.
