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From: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Unix on the Mac - A/UX replacements
Message-ID: <1990Dec5.051741.1909@julius.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 90 05:17:41 GMT
References: <1148@duteca.UUCP>
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Organization: U of Illinois, Dept. of Computer Science, Systems Research Group
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thomas@duteca (Thomas Okken) writes:
>The FSF (the free software foundation, a
>group of programmer producing arguably the best software in the world
>, for free) boycott apple because of its look-and-feel lawsuits. That
>means that none of the FSF software (their c-compiler gcc,
>c++-compiler g++ and a plethora of other first rate tools) is not
>available for the MAC. This would be an important point against AUX
>for my uses of UNIX, maybe you feel similarily.  If you want any of
>their software (some of it is quasi-hacker-standard) you would have to
>port it yourself, which can be quite hard.

This is, in general, only half true. It is quite true that the FSF
maintains a boycott of A/UX; it does not follow, however, that FSF
tools are not available for A/UX. There are quite a number of people
maintaining ports of the major Gnu tools for A/UX. I maintain an
archive (at wuarchive.wustl.edu, in systems/aux/Gnu) that contains
a number of Gnu tools, including gas, gcc, g++, bash, gdb, and emacs.

>Regarding A/UX, It came up much easier than Open Desktop from SCO and gives
>a much nicer shell without needing X.  Eventually I plan to try compiling 
>the MIT distribution, but I'm not there yet.

If you've got access to ftp, a complete build of MIT X11R4 with all
patches and shared library support added by me is available from
the aforementioned wuarchive.wustl.edu archive (systems/aux/X11R4).

>If you want a complete, robust, Mac-compatible Unix system then A/UX is 
>the only way to go. There are very few Unix tools that you don't get. A/UX 
>is multiuser, but don't try having more than 2-3 people log into an fx. 
>Even though the OS can support many users, the hardware can't yet.

We commonly have 3-4 people on a IIx with no trouble. I've currently
got 9 CommandShell windows and MacX with epoch (remote) and several
istat's (local) with no particular load (and I'm running nn and posting
this on the ci :-)). I've gotten three compiles going at a time; the
load is quite noticable but not offensive.

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1990 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well.