ENIX?

[Jim Frost]

In article <178 at csun1.UUCP> weyrich at csun1.UUCP (Orville Weyrich) writes:
|Also, does anyone have any experience yet with using ENIX? The configuration
|I am considering using it on is:
|     a 16-MHz 80386-based AT-clone (Goldstar Technology GST-386) which
|is built around a Micronics motherboard and which has an Adaptec 2372 RLL 
|controller (1:1 interleave), Seagate ST-4096 hard drive, 1.2 Meg floppy, 
|8087 coprocessor, two standard RS-232 ports, two standard parallel ports, 
|a CGA video board, 2-Meg of main memory, and AWARD BIOS version C3.03.  

We set up ENIX about a week ago and have had several problems.  First,
ENIX comes with virtually no man pages, a serious problem to serious
users.  Second, the ENIX manuals are often incorrect or incomplete
(one such case is the information on altering the key table which is
both inaccurate and incomplete).  Third, some packages (such as the X
addition) are poorly implemented and may not include things which are
generally considered "necessary" (such as xset).  Additionally, we
found that several of the ENIX disks were marked incorrectly (ie
diskette "2 of 5" and "3 of 5" were actually two copies of "2 of 5"),
making installation impossible.

Some of these problems may be corrected as ENIX becomes more mature,
but in general we were not impressed.  We also have installed
Interactive's 386/ix, which is in my opinion a better product at the
moment.  Neither ENIX nor Interactive would compile GNU Emacs
configured for SysV (basically there were some problems with signals),
and both gave an image which would dump core on some operations once
it did compile.  We haven't tracked down these dumps yet, partially
due to the primitive debugging tools.

ENIX and Interactive will run reasonably on a system with 4Mb core and
40Mb of disk; two megabytes might work but it won't work well.  We are
running ENIX and Interactive on 16MHz 80386 clones with 80Mb
disk, 4Mb core, VGA, two serial (one dedicated to mouse), at least
one parallel, and both work reasonably excepting the above.  We are
also running Xenix on a similar system with monochrome graphics, which
works quite well.

I hope this is helpful.  If you need additional information feel free
to contact me via email.

jim frost
madd at bu-it.bu.edu