Bell Tech W.G.E. use with "sissy" unix

[Scott Turner]

Latest news from Bell... Brace yerselves...

Nope, it isn't here yet. X11 is yet another "60 days" away, at least for the
AT&T port. ISC is said to have a version for the WGE but no word from Bell
about when it might be available.

An alpha test of the X11 should show at UnixExpo, perhaps with other vaporous
creatures such as the Color WGE (capable of 1280x1024x8, 1024x1024x8,
1024x720x8 one card fits all monitor budgets. :) But here again there were
no promises, and absolutely NO promises about ship dates for the Color WGE.

Bell's version of NFS is yet another 30 days away now. (Microport has been
a tad wishy washy on their NFS dates as well.)

The only "firm" words were about Sys5r3.2. My sales person seemed pretty
convinced it would be out by Halloween. However, he claimed that AT&T
expects everyone to "buy it again" if they wish to upgrade from Sys5r3.0...
No upgrade deals.

Other WGE issues straight from the mailbag...

How the hell do you spawn a login xterm from init? I thought this question had
an easy answer when it first showed in my E-Mail box. I mean I've seen Sun's
do this no problem, you just reached into /etc/ttys and ooopss! Yeah, no damn
/etc/ttys! So now what do we do? Well, it looked like xterm had the answer
after all, there's this -L command line switch which tells it both that it's
a login xterm and which pty to use.

So off to /etc/inittab to insert:
x0:23:respawn:/usr/new/xterm =80x25 unix:0 -L ttyvf

Probings so far seem to indicate that the Bell supplied xterm doesn't grok
the -L option. You get a usage report when you attempt to fire up xterm
directly and feed it -L.

Without support for -L there is nothing we can come up with for spawning a
login xterm. Anyone out there got any ideas? Bell's Tech support doesn't have
any answers, even for their own unix.

There was a question in the mail bag asking what an "Adaptec tune-up PAL" was
for the Mylex motherboard. Well youse pay $15 and youse get another 20Kb per
second throughput with the ACB2322 ESDI controller. At least that's what
happened here, your mileage may vary. But we get 492Kb per second here (out
of the promised 1Mb per second, and yes, it's formatted 1:1) and we got 472Kb
per second before the upgrade.

A note to all my self appointed fire extinguishers out there:

Go read the postings before sending me any more mail. I'm tired of people
wanting me to do their research for them on the topic of the "Sandy Wars".
To summarize my position on this whole mess in one sentence: I'm not anti-bbs
or anti-download restrictions, I just think the man should have stated things
a little more clearly in his public announcement of TeX being available on
his system. 

The flame war was wasn't entirely negative as some have suggested. As a result
of the battle uunet may get one more customer, Sandy may get two more BBS users,
and I got the E-Mail address to send requests to if I find something missing
on uunet that I want. And that's just what has hit my mail box, who knows what
has hit Sandy's.

Scott Turner
scotty at l5comp -or- uunet!l5comp!scotty

Unix vendor "fan" quotes from my mailbag:

"If God had meant for man to buy Bell Tech unix we would have all been born
Unix gurus."
	-Name withheld by request

"Congratulations on getting something out of Microport at all."
	-John Willis