386/ix review (longish)

[Larry Campbell]

A few months ago, I posted an article asking for opinions and
recommendations on the various flavors of System V for 386 boxes.  Well, my
hardware finally arrived, I've been running Interactive's 386/ix for six
weeks now, and I thought I'd share my experiences with the net.
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SHORT VERSION:

386/ix is great!  The installation was smooth, it works, and it has features
coming out of its ears.  But if you buy a Dell 310 with >2MB of memory, be
sure to demand a Rev B00 memory expansion card.
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LONG VERSION:

HARDWARE
Dell 310 (20MHz 386/AT clone), 4MB RAM, VGA clone, mono monitor (sigh),
90MB 18ms ESDI disk.

INSTALLATION
Nearly flawless.  The only hitch was that I had not selected the appropriate
drive type in the CMOS RAM;  the MS-DOS that Dell ships doesn't care, but
386/ix refused to boot from the hard disk until I corrected the error. 
Other than that, it was by the book -- my mother could have installed it.

GENERAL COMMENTS
386/ix is very nice.  The "sysadm" utility, although it looks like training
wheels at first, is very nice for some things (like adding user accounts and
uucp links), not so nice for others.  386/ix has virtual consoles, which I
never want to be without again.

The system is very AT&T flavored.  The manuals are the paperback AT&T System
V/386 manuals published by Prentice-Hall.  Strangely, not only does
Interactive not ship the complete set of manuals with the kit, they don't
even sell them at extra cost.  To get the complete set I had to go down to
the Harvard Coop and pick them up.  You'd think Interactive could make an
extra buck or two reselling the things, and save me the trip to the
bookstore...

The system came with a few non-AT&T things I haven't installed yet.
Something called TenPlus (some sort of office automation package) and
something called MultiView, a windowing system of some sort.  Other than
these, the chief enhancements Interactive seems to have provided over and
above the standard AT&T distribution are virtual consoles, VGA and ESDI
support, and VP/ix, an MS-DOS emulator.

VP/ix
The MS-DOS emulator works and is quite impressive.  It runs DOS applications
in a 640K virtual PC/XT.  The UNIX file system is available as drive Z: via
the standard Microsoft redirector (that is, it looks like a file server
drive would on an MS-NET network).  Drive C:, the boot drive, is a single
(large) UNIX file.  Drive D: is the actual DOS partition on your hard disk,
if you have one.

I haven't tried a whole lot of DOS applications, but the few I have tried
have included some pretty low-down ones -- Flight Simulator, Microsoft
Windows, LC-Term (a terminal emulator).  They all run, although a bit slower
than on the bare iron, of course.  Interrupt latency varies a lot and can be
high, so the terminal emulator drops characters at 9600 baud.  Windows works
fine, which was pretty impressive.

Using VP/ix can be spooky at times.  If your DOS application hangs or loops,
you can hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and your virtual DOS machine boots -- cleared
screen, BIOS signon, and all.  A bit unnerving when UNIX is running on the
machine.

OTHER COMMENTS
The system comes with Honey DanBer uucp (aka "Basic Networking Utilities"),
which is very nice.  TCP/IP support via STREAMS is available, but I haven't
received it yet so can't comment.  All my favorite tools from my old system
(Jove and news, mostly) ported painlessly.

SOFTWARE WARTS
Running shl(1) on any virtual console other than "the" console panics
the kernel.  Interactive knows about this.

uugetty doesn't work, so it is very, very difficult to use a single phone
line for both dialup use and for uucp dialout.  Rumor has it the next
release (SVR3.1) will fix this.  Until the fix arrives, this is my
biggest headache so far with the software.

The key sequence to switch virtual consoles is very awkward.  To switch to,
say, virtual console 2, I have to press Alt-SysReq F2, which has my fingers
jumping all over the place.

I have not been able to get my joystick or Logitech bus mouse to work under
VP/ix.  Interactive says they're working on the mouse problem; I'm not the
only Logitech user to have complained.

HARDWARE WARTS
The Dell memory expansion card, which holds the second two megabytes of
memory, has a bug which causes a memory parity panic whenever I write to the
raw floppy device.  Really!  This is the _only_ way I have been able to
cause this panic, and it happens _every_ time.  Dell has redesigned the card,
and says I should have one in a few weeks.  In the meantime, I can't do
backups, but other than that, the system works fine.

CONCLUSION
I would not hesitate to recommend 386/ix.  I also like the Dell box a lot,
and would recommend it as soon as they fix their memory card.  (If you order
a Dell 310 with >2MB of memory, be sure to demand the Rev B00 memory card.)
-- 
Larry Campbell                          The Boston Software Works, Inc.
campbell at bsw.com                        120 Fulton Street
wjh12!redsox!campbell                   Boston, MA 02146