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From: wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Laptop Xenix/UNIX
Message-ID: <1863@ho95e.ATT.COM>
Date: Sun, 15-Nov-87 15:34:53 EST
Article-I.D.: ho95e.1863
Posted: Sun Nov 15 15:34:53 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Nov-87 06:37:34 EST
References: <238@genat.UUCP>
Reply-To: wcs@ho95e.UUCP (46133-Bill.Stewart,2G218,x0705,)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs 46133, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 39

In article <238@genat.UUCP> george@genat.UUCP (George Gorsline) writes:
:Does anyone have any information on Toshiba (or other) laptops running Xenix
:or UNIX.  We handle both SCO and Toshiba, both of whom claim there is no
:product running today, but many rumours persist.  Can anybody enlighten us?

The basic problems are lack of disk space, and vendor support.  A
typical laptop has two 720K floppies, which is marginally enough to
have UNIX itself plus a removable disk for your applications.
You can run UNIX in that much space, but UNIX is really a lot happier
with a hard disk so you can hold the applications you're used to.
In the MS-DOS world, people are used to switching floppy disks a lot,
but remember that MS-DOS usually doesn't mind, whereas UNIX wants to be warned.
(I assume you want the machine for "user"-type work rather than software
development;  to do serious development, you'll need a hard disk
anyway, so there's room to run Xenix.)

The Minix operating system, written by Andy Tanenbaum and friends, does
fit on a two-360K-floppy PC.  Booting it is annoying, because you have
to switch disks a few times to get everything loaded, but it's
compatible with V7 UNIX and has enough utilities to be a real
environment.  It's been ported to the Toshiba, and the 720K floppies
give a lot more room to do real work, and eliminate the boot problem.
It was written as a learning environment, and comp.os.minix readers are
always updating it, so it takes a bit of work to keep up to date,
but it can be used to do real work.

If you want to run a larger environment, such as Xenix V or Venix,
you'll have some trouble fitting it all, but it can be done.
You'll probably want to have a hard-disk machine around to repackage
everything onto floppies with.

However, I'd recommend an alternative approach for most users.
Use MS-DOS, and get the MKS Toolkit, so you'll have most of the
utilities you're used to, including a real shell, ls, vi, etc.
It isn't real UNIX, since there's still a single-process silly OS
underneath, but it feels a lot more like it than raw DOS.
-- 
#				Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs