Multiplatform support

Plastic SCM is designed to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X machines, including different flavors of these operating systems.

  • The entire Windows family is supported, from Windows 2000 to Windows 7, including the 32-bit and 64-bit variants.
  • A wide variety of Linux distributions are supported and have been thoroughly tested, including Ubuntu, RedHat, Fedora, Suse, OpenSuse, and Mandriva.
  • Mac OS X is fully supported, including PPC platforms (10.4) Intel x86 platforms (10.5 and higher).

Servers and clients available on all platforms

The Plastic SCM repository server runs on all the supported platforms: Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. By default, the server is configured to use a Firebird embedded backend (Windows) or a SQLite backend (Linux and MacOS X). The backend can be easily changed, to increase scalability and performance.

Full GUI support on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

Both the graphical user interface (GUI) client and command-line interface (CLI) client run on all the supported platforms. Visualization of the SCM environment is a key Plastic SCM feature; accordingly, the GUI client has the same functionality and the same look-and-feel on all platforms.

Fully compatible client and servers across different OSs

Client-server communications are not restricted by operating system. For example, Windows clients can connect to Linux servers, and vice-versa. Any other combination is supported, too, making for true heterogeneous development support.

Data transfers use a custom TCP protocol, optimized to keep data traffic to a minimum. The protocol is specifically designed to support heterogeneous software (different operating systems) and hardware (big-endian vs. little-endian) configurations.

Native 64-bit support

Both the client and the server are optimized to run on 64-bit hardware, taking advantage of the extended-memory models and high-performance operations.

Plastic SCM performs many memory-intensive operations, so it's important for the repository server to be able to use large amounts of installed RAM and not be limited to a 32-bit address space.

Separate installers are available for 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Designed for multithreaded operation and multi-core hardware

The Plastic SCM client and server software are designed for multithreaded operation. Clients take advantage of multithreading in certain areas (such as Update), but it is the repository server that enjoys the greatest benefits of this technology. The scalability of the Plastic SCM server is greatly enhanced by its ability to run multiple threads on multi-core CPUs.

Linux distributions and other flavors of Unix

Plastic SCM's main, fully-tested Linux distributions are Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse, OpenSuse, Fedora, and Mandriva. But Plastic SCM is known to work on other Linux distributions, too. And it runs on other Unix operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Solaris, and OpenSolaris.

Check with support@codicesoftware.com if you have questions about the Linux/Unix distribution you use.