Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Unix for a 386-PC? Summary (627 lines)
Message-ID: <39233@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 29 Sep 89 19:41:03 GMT
References: <8909290807.AA17277@euler.Berkeley.EDU> <629@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: madd@cs.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 67

In article <629@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
||  Xenix wins hands down on
||  minimum required RAM and fixed disk, although I found its treatment of
||  larger disks to be very naive, not even handling separate root and
||  /usr partitions well.  
|
|  I haven't seen any problems in about two years of Xenix/386. ie. it
|is not better or worse at handling partitions than Ultrix, SunOS, or
|any other SysV port. Any SysV without symbolic links has limitations
|about where to put things, but Xenix has no special limitiations of
|which I'm aware.

In particular I was referring to installation.  The installation
scripts that I used (sorry, can't remember what Xenix version) allowed
the creation of separate root and /usr partitions but repeatedly
commented that I didn't have enough space on root to hold what I was
installing even though it was being installed on /usr.  You could
still do the installation, but it really bitched about it.

The Xenix development stuff puts a lot of libraries in /lib instead of
/usr/lib, which means you have to have a very large root partition or
things won't fit.  I prefer to keep root as small as possible so as
not to loose too much when it gets smashed.

My biggest problem with Xenix was that it absolutely, positively
refused to allow me to allocate a 16mb swap partition.  No way, no how
would it let me use more than 11mb.  I'm not sure if this might have
been due to bad cylinders on my disk or not, but I was pretty unhappy
about it anyway.

|  SCO UNIX has a fast filesystem, I don't know if s-links have been added.

The version of SCO Xenix which I used did not.  None of the 386 UNIX's
which I have used supported symbolic links (I miss them dearly).

|  There are many things which are actual shortcomings of Xenix, but
|costomization isn't one of them. There are many people, including me,
|who customize Xenix frequently. [...]

Do you customize by script, or by hand?  None of the 386 UNIX's were
particularly difficult to customize by hand, but 386/ix had fairly
good scripts for doing it automatically.  I'm not talking about adding
a device driver here, I'm talking about tuning and partitioning.

|No
|problems with customize at all,

I'm sorry to disagree with you.  In addition to the inadequacies I
have mentioned, try installing TCP/IP sometime.  I did.  It then took
me a considerable amount of time to tune the STREAMS parameters so
that TCP/IP would *work* -- the TCP/IP package did not increase many
parameters to realistic ranges although it did alter several STREAMS
parameters.  In contrast, the 386/ix installation's default settings
worked like a dream.

|I suspect the poster just doesn't know
|what s/he's doing.

It's possible that we're not talking about the same version of the
software.  In any case, I gave honest, experienced opinions about two
of the UNIX's in question.  As both a user and a developer, I'm not
entirely sure I'd like to use Xenix anyway; it's environment is
sufficiently strange as to make development somewhat difficult.  Take
my advice or leave it, but don't question my abilities.

jim frost
madd@std.com