general questions on AUX

[Richard Michael Todd]

In article <1053 at gort.cs.utexas.edu> jason at cs.utexas.edu (Jason Levitt) writes:
>>3. Is it possible to get academic discount on it?
>    Call Apple at 338-2115. I don't know.
Since I bought mine at academic discount rates, I'd say the answer was 
*yes* :-). :-).  Ask your local university Apple representative to let you
look at their price list.  I had no trouble ordering mine thru the Univ. of
Oklahoma's Computer Store; I'd be surprised if UTexas had any problems 
doing it.  

>>4. Since free software foundation refuses to support macs, is someone
>>else providing the ports of their programs for the mac, especially of
>>the gawk? I have noticed that someone has a gcc source for mac available at 
>>some archive. How difficult has it been to port such programs. I think the 
>>most difficult will be gnuemacs if all the functionality of mac windows, etc 
>>has to be provided. Other programs, such as gawk, g++, bash, etc should 
>>be trivial. Is this correct? 
>    Available via anonymous ftp from apple.com.
To be exact, gcc and GNU Emacs ports to A/UX are available on apple.com.
Most everything else that I've looked at is trivial to port, except for
GDB.  GDB has all sorts of nasty machine dependencies, and will be non-
trivial to port.  I'd love to hear from someone who has ported it to
A/UX.

>>5. How robust is the AUX compared to SunOs and how does the Macwindows
>>support in AUX compared to sunview?
I've found very few bugs in A/UX.  The C compiler shares the common SysV 
braindamage of having entirely too small table sizes; this will bite you
if you compile really large stuff.  (The X11r3 distribution has their own
replacement cpp for just this reason--the Apple cpp cannot handle the X11
source.)  Reportedly there is a bug in the NFS code that under the right
(rather rare) conditions can cause the system to hang; since I don't use
NFS, I've never seen it myself.  As for how robust it is compared to 
SunOS, I can't say; since some people have complained of SunOS 4.0 being
a beta-test release in disguise, A/UX might well be more robust than SunOS...
As for windowing, the A/UX stock windowing scheme is really nothing but 
an emulation of the MacOS graphics and windowing system traps.  You can
write programs under A/UX much as you can under MPW (or so I'm told--I'm
not very familiar with MacOS system calls), and many MacOS programs can
be run under A/UX.  A/UX comes with a program called "term" which puts
up multiple windows, each with a shell on it.  You can't really run multiple
"tool programs" each of which has its own window on the screen as you can
with SunWindows.  If that's important to you, you'll have to get X Window
and run it on your A/UX system.  Note that if you don't want to shell out
the bucks to Apple for X Window, and you don't mind a monochrome-only
server, and you've got plenty of disk space, you can take the stock X11R3
source (available from your favorite neighborhood FTP site) and compile it
yourself.  Note that the server Apple sells has color support; the one on
the X11R3 tape doesn't.  Rumour has it that the X11R4 release will include
color support for the Mac, and it's reportedly still due out "this yearish".

>>6. Is it reasonably fast in terms of response time as compared to a 11/780
>>with a few users? Are there any benchmark results available for AUX on the 
>>ci/cx versus SunOs on SparcStation-1 or some other Unix implemenattion? If
>>anyone has used both the Sun386i and mac/AUX, do you think AUX is faster
>>than the painfully slow Sun386i or not? 
>    If someone has this information, *I'd* be interested too.
I did some benchmark testing (using the MUSBUS suite) on A/UX 1.0 (some 
time ago, obviously).  As I recall, my Mac IIx was pretty much comparable
to a Sun-3 on everything except file I/O; on file I/O the Mac loses 
considerably because of the System V filesystem.  I've never seen a 
SparcStation or a Sun386i, so I can't comment on how it compares to those.
Your Mac IIci should be considerably faster than the Mac IIx I used.  Also
reportedly disk performance was improved somewhat in A/UX 1.1; I suppose
I should rerun those benchmarks...
>>7. Is AUX based on Unix V or the bsd version? 
>    Appears to be System V Release 2 kernel with BSD 4.3 networking and
>extensions. I'd like to know what kind of filesystem and memory management
>is being used.
System V filesystem (grr...) and apparently System V memory management.  
At least, it allows the dynamic adding and removal of swap partitions that
SysV allows, so I assume that the memory management is SysV.
-- 
Richard Todd   rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us  or  rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  
"MSDOS is a Neanderthal operating system" - Henry Spencer