'386 Unix Wars

[Greg A. Woods]

In article <2812 at cirrusl.UUCP> dhesi%cirrusl at oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
> Everex has a fair implementation (except for one or two
> things that don't work at all) but the worst documentation I have seen
> for an operating system (based on the two manuals included with what I
> bought -- you can buy more manuals, which I suspect will be of the same
> miserable quality).

I can't speak directly for the ESIX implementation, but from most
accounts I've heard, it is very solid, and quite efficient!

As for ESIX documentation, they did the right thing.  Let the
publishers publish and the programmers programme.  Standard
SysVr3.2/386 doc's from Prentice Hall are all you need for ESIX beyond
the rather wonderful release notes, etc. I've seen from Everex.

> For business purposes I recommend SCO.  Although I personally haven't
> used SCO Xenix, I did use Microsoft's Xenix on a number of different
> machines in the past, and it was more stable than System V/AT or ESIX.
> I also uses AT&T's System V (a. UNIX PC, sort of System V Release 2
> with Release 1 utilities; b. System V Release 3 on an AT&T 3B2).

I've re-booted more SCO XENIX (286 & 386) systems because they've hung
or paniced than almost everything else I've ever used, combined!  The
most reliable system I've used is my AT&T 3B2.  Even our shoddy old
ISC 386/ix 1.0.6 is more reliable than any SCO O/S I've used.  The
scariest O/S I currently have access to is the AT&T 3B1 3.1.5.4, with
Starlan.  It trashes things like wtmp and panics for no obvious reason.

I've not used SCO's UNIX 3.2 enough to know if it is any more stable,
but because of other issues I strongly recommend against using it.

> Although it was stable and relatively free of bugs, the quality of
> documentation was standard AT&T, which means no indexes, poor
> organization, and nonexistent information about system administration
> procedures.  The Xenix documentation was little better.

EXCUSE ME?!?!?!  What do you call the permuted index?  I call it the
best damn index ever invented!  Even the SysVr3.0/386 Guide's have good
(normal) indexes for each section!

XENIX documentation always scared me because of the re-organisation.
I was never sure if something had been moved, or removed.

> For good documentation and powerful features, you have no choice but to
> try to find a BSD derivative (anything except Ultrix).  Right now I use
> SunOS at work and find it to be relatively stable and moderately well
> documented.  AT&T's SVR3 seemed to be to a little better debugged than
> SunOS, but it also did far less and the documentation was pretty bad.

Hmm...  It's real hard to determine your prejudices when you say BSD
doc's are great, one paragraph after giving some praise to XENIX doc's.

I find the BSD doc's (i.e. Sun's or the USENIX version) slightly
clunky, since they are attempting to hang on to an organisational
methodology invented for a doc set that would easily fit in your slim
briefcase.

I find the SysVr3.x doc's to be extremely good.  The 3.0 stuff was
missing some info about new features, though a lot of that stuff was
in the release notes for particular implementations.  The 3.2 doc's
fixed my major complaint of splitting the User's Ref. and the Admin's
Ref.

> So, although the picture looks pretty bleak right now for UNIX on the
> 386, things should improve when SVR4 stabilizes (and, I hope, becomes
> cheaper).

Hmm... I thought SysVr4.0/386 was quite stable already!  It is quite
cheap from most current suppliers (eg. Dell and UHC).

>From what I've seen of the Prentice Hall 4.0 doc's, they are terrific!
If only Prentice Hall would publish a version in/for 8x11 binders, and
publish update sets and "bug" fixes.  I'd pay the extra money!
-- 
							Greg A. Woods
woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP		ECI and UniForum Canada
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]  VE3TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible-ORWELL