putting a machine together, some questions

[Dan Smith "Nightmare on Elway Street"]

	[in case this has been covered to death, Please email me
	at: dansmith at well.sf.ca.us or ucbcad.edu!island!daniel]

	My wife (sprice at well.sf.ca.us) and I are putting together
a 386 for home, and have a couple of questions.  First off, here's
our hardware list:

	33 Mhz 386 w/64k cache on a Mylex motherboard with AMI bios
	4 meg ram, probably 70 ns (to start)
	ESDI controller w/Toshiba 300 Meg drive (sorry don't know model
		numbers at the moment)
	Paradise 16 bit VGA w/512k -- 1024x768
	Microsoft bus mouse
	Northgate (OMNI) 101 keyboard
	2 ser/1 par ports
	NEC 4D monitor

	we'll need to get a tape backup (definitely!)...I want to get
	a 1/4" drive in order to be compatible with Sun 1/4" (I'm
	assuming that "tar" or any other standard utility on a 386
	Unix will be compatible with SunOS versions....hmmm, perhaps
	I should not assume so much!

	now, for software...

	I'm confused as to whether to go with ESIX, Interactive Systems,
or SCO (further confused as to difference between SCO Xenix and SCO Unix!)
We want something that's going to be compatible with the above hardware
(we can still make changes in the hardware list, that's no problem),
obviously, and something that can run X11R4, possibly with Motif.

	I lean towards ESIX because of price and Xenix binary compatibility.

	Oh, and one other thing...my wife wants to have OS/2 and
DOS partitions on this (yea, I know...we have this constant teasing
at home of Unix vs OS/2, X vs PM...that 300 meg doesn't seem like
it's going to be enough!).  Is it feasible to set up the machine
to boot into one of 3 environments?  It's possible that we could get
another disk so that one would be all Unix, and the other one would
be split between OS/2 and DOS...

	So I ask for your opinions: which Unix?  what hardware changes would
you make?  My thanks in advance.

				dan
-- 
   dansmith at well.sf.ca.us   daniel at island.uu.net   unicom!daniel at pacbell.com
ph: (415) 332 3278 (h), 491 1000 (w) disclaimer: Island's coffee was laced :-)