'386 Unix Wars

[Sean Eric Fagan]

In article <1990Dec31.053142.10444 at robobar.co.uk> ronald at robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>OK Sean, I believe that, but have you considered how much happier you might
>be running SVR4 instead ?  Hey, that's a *good* idea......

Actually, yeah, I have.  And I've also considered how much happier I might
be if I ran xenix.  Or ISC.  Or (*gasp*) Microport.  Or Dell.  Or Esix.
Etc.

My reasons for going with SCO aren't all the same as everyone else's (I
mean, not everyone knows the home phone number of quite a few of the kernel
engineers 8-)), but I think some of them are relevant.  And, as has been
demonstrated time and time again, quite a bit of what I want matches quite a
few people's desires.  Faster kernel, more reliable system, smaller kernel
(quite possibly synonymous with the faster part 8-)), bugless devsys, etc.

Some of the reasons I do use SCO UNIX instead of some other one (including
Mach or BSD, which I can get through various means):  familiarity with the
product (as if you couldn't guess 8-)), stability, features I want/like,
ease of installation, ease of use, ease of maintainance.

kithrup has three main uses:  email, playing around, and news (roughly in
that order of importance).  A friend set up the MMDF system while I was in
Canada for a while, so I really cannot say how easy or difficult it was.  He
said it was fairly easy.  I've since changed it a few times, in relatively
minor ways.  While I admit the documentation could be better (all I had was
the online stuff), it wasn't too hard.  (I think my major gripe with it was
the fact that I ended up, at one point, with a 25Mb log file, which had
eaten up about three quarters of my available disk space.  *grrr*  Hooray
for the quot command! 8-))

For development, I now only do '386 development.  I use both /bin/cc and
gcc (with a slight emphasis on the latter, recently, since I've been doing
lots of inline assembly lately), and have no real non-standard libraries (I
think I replaced the opendir et al in libx.a with the ones from libc, and
did some appropriate changes on the header files to match).  I run into
about as many problems as I did on my Sun-3/50 three years ago, when trying
to port stuff from the net.  Most of the time, I end up trying to teach
programs that BSD systems aren't the only ones with SIGTSTP and company...

For news, well, I run trn, rn, and C News.  Fairly simple to get working.  I
spent about three hours worth of work on C news, including compiling times.
Using cc, not gcc, incidently.  The couple of problems I ran into, I mailed
to Henry, and got some feedback.

Despite my diatribe against C2, I really do have to admit I run into it
rarely.  (When I do, I might scream at my snake for a few minutes, though...
8-) 8-))  If it were just a *little* bit more unobtrusive, I think the only
reason I would notice it's there is because I use sysadmsh to create users
instead of vi, mkdir, and cp.

Anyway, kithrup is a very stable machine.  uptime reports:

  1:57am  up 11 days,  6:15,  6 users,  load average: 0.14, 0.02, 0.00

(the six users are:  root, sef, sef, sef, news, sef.)  It was brought down
11 days ago so that I could install an FPU, and move some of the cars around
to fit better.  Four of those days, I wasn't here at all, and it still
handled mail and news (including forwarding three messages to some people
who are no longer around to play with kithrup).

It took me a shade less than 12 hours to compile the entire X11R4
distribution, a couple of weeks ago (without the FPU, I should add).
Although not incredible, I do believe that is credible performance,
especially, again, while running other tasks (including news, email, some
playing around, and being used as a terminal).

Look, this is a bit longer than I'd intended.  All I'm trying to say is that
3.2v2 is, I think, worthwhile.  I like it, and I *have* considered the
alternatives.  None of them offers me enough benefits to go with the risk
(i.e., a non-SCO supplier [including, potentially, myself!]).  About the
only thing I want on kithrup right now, I think, is dynamic linking, and
I've got a couple ideas about that anyway...

This was not intended to be a sales plug or anything.  Just reasons why I'm
satisfied, for the most part, with what I have.

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it;
sef at kithrup.COM  |  I had a bellyache at the time."
-----------------+           -- The Turtle (Stephen King, _It_)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.