Any 3b2 gurus out there?

[Brian Chan]

After working with Sun workstations for 18 months, I have the sudden
fortune to port software to the 3b2s. Can anyone share their expierences
on why the 3b2 is such a difficult beast to port software to? Or I'm just
the only buggy one? 

To make my point, I'm having a wonderful time to try to bring gcc up.
(The big mistake was we didn't buy the LPI-C so that we could at least  
use CodeWatch instead of sdb.)  With the help from John Lees (he's 
making much more progress than I have though) and Brinton Cooper, I 
was able to make the pass 1 compiler to work with small files but it bombed
on cc1. 

I run Esix  3.2 Rev D at home on my Gateway. I was able to port my
stuff from the Suns and  made it to run on the 386 without too much trouble.
(Same thing with gcc.)  I was also able to make it to run under MSDOS
if I stripped out the Unix stuff. 

Granted: I may have bugs in my software (tons of linked  lists, 
pointers and dynamic arrays.) My $20 question: Esix licenced the
3.2.2 code from ATT and I'm using the stock portable C compiler.
Why does generic code work on Esix and not on 3b2?  Why most GNU stuff
don't have header files for 3b2? (I know I should ask RMS instead.)
We managed to get Emacs to work but it core dumps on the 3b2 so often
that I write most of my stuff on the Sun and move it afterward. 
(Anyone ported a clean Emacs to the 3b2?) Okay the problem may be
WIN3 since I use the Sun to telnet the 3b2. 

We also got bash to work , well, kinda. Sometimes our uids will change
to some random number and we will lost our write permssions. We had
to do su. How weird?

This is not meant to be an attack on ATT so no flame please. The fact
is my $6500 clone is faster than this $250,000 machine and the 33-386 is
much more productive. Although I must add the ATT socket libaray is much better
than the Esix,  I was able to port the Sun socket stuff to run on it
without much trouble. 

So if anyone of you have successfully ported gcc, gdb and g++, _please_
let me know. You can save lots of people's grieves. (I'll post a summary
if there's any.)  Actually are there anyone using the 3b2s besides
the Government/Military/Academic institutions? 

Thank you very much of your time,

Brian Chan
Stuttgart, FRG


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