MacOS Archives - IT Jungle

Why The IBM i Market Needed Another VTL Option

November 3, 2025 Greg Tevis

Over many decades now, the IBM i community of software vendors has done a great job coming up with new ways to extend and improve the systems that IBM has built for midrange customers. But every once in a while, a new idea comes into the IBM i community from the outside.

So it is with Compass Tape Gateway from Cobalt Iron, which modernizes IBM i backup by replacing traditional VTL complexity with an automated, software‑defined experience. It treats IBM i as a first‑class part of enterprise data protection – not a silo – so teams get simpler operations, …
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Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …
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AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …
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IBM and Microsoft Bring .NET to Power, After All

November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

Despite initially denying the existence of a project to bring the Microsoft .NET runtime to Power, IBM this week officially announced that .NET version 7 will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power. The technology becomes available immediately, although the database driver connecting .NET applications to Db2 for i will take more time.

Over the years, there have been various attempts at getting the .NET runtime unhooked from its Windows roots and replanted on the Power platform, including some targeting the IBM i operating system. In 2011, a big step forward was made with the Mono Project, which …
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RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

August 2, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM i developers who run Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) on macOS are running into trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest release of macOS Big Sur, version 11.5. However, with patience and perseverance, IBM i developers are finding ways to get it to run. An official fix from IBM has yet to be made.

Reports of problems getting RDi 9.6 to run on Big Sur emerged in June, when users began to post reports on IBM i chat boards, including the new IBM Community site. Users reported problems installing RDi on Big Sur, as well as …
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Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, …
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Mono Comes to RPM, Making .NET on IBM i Even Easier

December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

Here’s some good news for IBM i developers who want to develop using Microsoft’s .NET framework and tools: the Mono runtime for IBM i is now available via the RPM and Yum open source delivery method. Delivering Mono this way should make it even easier for IBM i developers to take advantage of the popular .NET tooling and runtime.

Jesse Gorzinski, IBM‘s business architect of open source technologies, broke the news on Thanksgiving Day. “#IBMi users have something to be thankful for today: .NET in RPM form! Yes, you can ‘yum install’ mono now, from @friedkiwi’s repo!!” Gorzinski wrote …
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IBM Delivers New Goodies with ACS Update

December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM has issued a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), the indispensable Java-based client that delivers a range of functionality to administrators, developers, and users alike. In the new release of ACS, IBM delivers enhancements across a range of functions, including SQL queries, database schemas, data transfer, and printing and emulation.

IBM first unveiled ACS way back in August 2012 as the strategic replacement for older IBM i client interfaces, such as Access for Windows, Access for Web, and Access for Linux. With a full 5250 emulator, support for printing, the capability to view IFS, spool file, and message …
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