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From: sal@grip.cis.upenn.edu (Marcos Salganicoff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Wanted: Info on tried and true roll your own 386sx system.
Message-ID: <35204@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 29 Dec 90 22:38:26 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: sal@grip.cis.upenn.edu (Marcos Salganicoff)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 33

Please forgive me, i'm new to this group so if this topic has been beaten to
death could someone please send me a thread summary. Anyhow, My head is
spinning and my arms ache as I put down the latest computer shopper magazine.


Goal State: 386sx box with monochrome vga, mouse, >= 40mbyte hard disk
and 4mb of memory to run windos 3.0 _decently_ (i would like to become
an ex mac+ user) and Unix workalike like coherent by mark williams).

Possible Sol'ns: I'm am considering either buying a complete
(zeos/dell/packard-bell ....)  386sx system or buying the goodies
separately (i.e. bare-bones chassis/supply/motherboard combo, vga
board, monochrome monitor, and hard disk etc. etc.)  I've come up with
a proposed system using the "roll your own" technique for ~1400 bucks
(just hardware) which meets the above criteria, but I am new to the
world of Clonedom. Is life really as straightforward as it seems? Can
I just buy the goodies and load in the appropriate drivers by
bootstrapping from a minimal floppy based system, or will it be a
never ending fingerpointing nightmare of timing problems and
bios-incompatibilities. I have access to monochrome display boards
that I can "borrow" in this process (so as to see what I'm typing
while I install the vga drivers etc.) Anyhow, if you've done something
approximately similar I'd love to hear about the combination of
hardware used and what was involved. Geez, I'll even post a summary
fer gosh sakes :-)

So the basic two questions are prepackaged vs. roll your own, and if
so, roll with what? Any takers?

Marcos Salganicoff
General Robotics and Active Sensing Lab
UPENN
Philadelphia, PA (USA)