Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
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From: jennings@anchor.colorado.edu (Jeff Jennings)
Subject: Re: How about a thread on UHC R4 Unix?
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.152336.2393@colorado.edu>
Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet)
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Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
References: <7776@gdc.portal.com> <10@maynhbd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1991 15:23:36 GMT

In article <10@maynhbd.UUCP> timj@maynhbd.UUCP (Tim Jones) writes:

>As for UHC, while we are not endorsing them officially,  we use their
>SVR4r2.0 set for our departmental host and have had very few problems
>(none that have not been resolved by a phone call to UHC TS).  It is
>extremely stable (not one PANIC: in three months of use), has a very
>good set of man pages (hard copy is available for additional $), full
>support for X11R4 with Openlook, NeWS (Sun) and Motif and is installable
>from tape!

We have 3 486 boxes running UHC where I work.  It took over two weeks to 
finally get the distribution installed, including almost daily calls to
UHC.  Packages have dependencies on other pacakages being installed, but 
nowhere is there a list of the order to install things in.  When a package
fails to install, it doesn't just give up and fail to install, it generally
trashes the kernel config files, requiring the entire base distribution to
be reinstalled.  Get the distribution on tape, we had no problems with
installing that.  We must have installed the system from floppies over a
dozen times.

Our boxes are EISA bus, with SCSI adapter cards, vga, logitech mice, 8-16 megs
of memory, 100-660 megs of disk space.  We tried a machine with 32 megs of
memory, there is a problem with the SCSI interface (hardware? driver?) such
that it trashes memory above 16 megs and the kernel panics.

Our machines seemed to panic once a day or so, we replaced the clone Adaptec
SCSI cards with real Adaptecs, the panic problems seemed to go away.

We are still waiting for the X manuals.  We got only the Open Look manuals.
The X implementation seems ok, resolution is only 640x480x16 on Paradise 
VGA 1024 cards.  They say they will have hi-res drivers for X soon.  No imake
program or Imake.tmpl files came with the X distribution, making it tough 
to compile applications.

We have the machines Etherneted together, using WD boards and thin wire 
ethernet.  No problems with NFS, TCP/IP, etc.

In summary, pretty good, still a few bugs in the distribution and installation
from floppies.  Still not quite stable, I would say, I didn't have anything
like these problems installing my ESIX system.  To be fair, we had some
problems installing VENIX (Interactive SVR3.2) on the same type 486 box, but
we never got the trashed kernel config or the kernel panics.

>
>Tim Jones	...!uunet!maynhbd!timj		The words here are my
>Keeper of the news -- Taker of the blame	own and don't reflect
>Maynard Electronics, Inc.			anything outside of my
>An Archive Company				own micro perspective!


-- 
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Jeff Jennings
University of Colorado, Boulder
jennings@boulder.colorado.edu