What ....... Dell UNIX V.4

[Piercarlo Grandi]

On 16 Nov 90 20:21:36 GMT, seg at ingres.com (scott e garfinkle) said:

>Does Dell's SVR4 support a wide range of hardware or mostly Dell hardware?

The answer seems to be: they are not prepared to support you, but they
have not done anything to make it more specific to Dell hardware thant
the base SVR4 distribution.

seg> For those who are interested:  One of the key items I was interested in
seg> was the X servers they provide.  As near as I can tell from the answer,
seg> you can only get high-res from the Dell graphics boards.

They seem to have provided added value only for their platform. But I
think this is fair. Ah of course, this is not striclty true: for the GNU
sw they have provided added value (e.g. ELF/DWARF support) for all
platforms! Triple cheers! This is IMNHO a sufficient reason to go with
Dell (support people who support free sw).


However I have just received from the very kind people at Dell UK some
additional details, that have put me off it a bit, they are:

1) you need a minimum of 8MB memory to *install*; it will probably run
in much less, depending on how you reconfigure it and which options
(frills/nofrills) you choose, but install loads into RAM a 1.5MB kernel
and 6MB of RAM disks.

2) It only comes on one 150MB cartridge (plus boot floppies); a release
on two 60MB cartridges may well happen but is not considered urgent
because DELL no longer sells 60MB tape units.

3) the upgrade price only applies to existing costumers of DELL SVR3.2.

In every other respect the Dell SVR4 seems to be the right stuff.
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
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