V/386 questions

[Bill Kennedy]

Perhaps these questions have been asked and answered, indulge me if so.
I have a Micronics 386, 4Mb RAM, WD FD/HD controller and a pair of
Miniscribe 6085 72Mb hard disks.  I have encountered some difficulties
and I'd like any input anyone might have about them.  By and large the
system works OK, no panics, no second HD problems but there are some
irritating idiosyncracies.  Has anyone -

1)Gotten the lp driver to a)drive an HP Laser Jet II at full speed (/dev/lp0)
  b)downloaded a soft font into the LJ-II.  I know that the serial driver can
  go full speed but it gets its feet tangled in XON/XOFF and doesn't see the
  XON come back...

2)Used, successfully, anything to do with floppy drive 1.  My drive 1 is a
  360K unit, works fine with naked DOS but neither V/386 nor Merge are able
  to read it.  The formatter (once you change the script grrr) seems to be
  able to write on it and the activity light seems normal but any attempt to
  read it fails.

3)Used Crosstalk under Merge to talk to any of the serial ports.  I have no
  gettys or uugettys running but Crosstalk just freezes and I have to kill
  the whole process to recover.  This is true of COM1 or COM2

Unrelated irritants that I'm just curious about - -  does your boot freeze
at the prompt?  In V/AT it would time out and go ahead and load system5 if
you didn't tell it to do something.  On my V/386 if you just press RETURN it
will go ahead and boot unix, but it patiently waits for RETURN.  That's a
real pain for an unattended system.  I started with a Keytronic keyboard and
it did some really strange stuff.  If you fiddled Num Lock at the wrong time
or (honest!) keyed in a ^S to stop the screen, the whole system just died,
had to reset to recover.  I changed to a Maxiswitch and that went away but
so did the quick shutdown with CTL-ALT-DEL.  Those are just nuisances I have
run into and I was curious if anyone else had seen them, and duplicated or
conquered them.

Has anyone installed the unlimited user upgrade for V/386 and Merge?  I have
it ordered but was warned that it comes without any documentation.  The parts
of Merge documentation that are missing are a pain but you can live with it.
I'm not enthusiastic about genning two new kernels with little more than the
mkunix manual page.  Has anyone gotten the promised Merge update?  If so,
comments are welcome.

Bill Kennedy ...{rutgers,cbosgd,ihnp4!petro}!ssbn!bill or bill at ssbn.WLK.COM
                (this is a guest account at Tolerant)