Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!pasteur!pasteur.berkeley.edu!oliver
From: oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu (Oliver Sharp)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Choosing a 386 UNIX
Message-ID: <9879@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 19 Dec 90 00:23:21 GMT
References: <2630@sixhub.UUCP> <28789@usc>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu (Oliver Sharp)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 34

I'm about to upgrade my AT with a 386 motherboard and I would like to bring
up UNIX on it.  At school, I use HP and Sun workstations to do parallel 
language research; it would be nice to work at home and transfer the
code back and forth with a minimal amount of hassle.  I use 4BSD at
school, but I don't mind the BSD/SysV compatibility problem too much
since I'd like the code to work on both platforms anyway.  I've been
able to get some work done in MSDOS by using Turbo C and MKS LEX and
YACC, but once I've gone through the trouble of moving the code to UNIX,
I generally don't want to bother moving it back.  The system I'm working
on consists of several processes communicating through sockets and needs
a few megs to run, so I can't work on the real thing under MSDOS anyway.

I experimented with Microsoft's 286 Xenix a number of years ago (when I
worked there), and it just wasn't very convenient to use.  It was
crippled on my machine by the small disk.  Now that I can put a
reasonable processor and disk in the system, I'm thinking about UNIX
again.  Since I haven't gotten any equipment yet, I have a fair amount
of freedom.  I'm interested in hearing about:

  1)  what motherboard/disk/UNIX combination you have used and found to 
     be both reliable and responsive
  2)  your impressions about the relative solidity of the different 386 UNIX
     implementations (Interactive, SCO, Dell, etc) and how well they
     support X Windows application development
  3)  what you think of 386BSD, if you have had any experience with it
     (this is a recent port of BSD that was just written up in DDJ)

I realize these are fairly broad questions, but I have seen other people
ask similar ones so I think the replies will be of general interest.  I will 
wait a few weeks and then summarize all the responses I get.  Perhaps that
will reduce the number of "what's a good UNIX" posts for a while.

Thanks in advance,
- Oliver Sharp