^3 What ....... Dell UNIX V.4

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <1990Nov21.232102.26005 at pegasus.com> richard at pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:

| No way will I go with Xenix.  I need real Unix.  And I very much want
| to go with V.4 when it's stable.

  Sounds like religion to me. If I need to use an XYZ board I'll run
what I need to support it. If XYZ is unusual that if often Xenix. This
stuff about not being real UNIX is initiated in part by other vendors.
Even Xenix comes from AT&T code, and it passes all the serious parts of
SVID. It's been around a long time and it also is very stable, if not
racy.

| SCO has, so far, promised NOT to go with V.4 -- buzzing about in their own
| separate reality.

  I believe they said they were not going with v.4.0, but were going to
wait for v.4.1. That's not the same thing in the long run. I was also
told they were going to add V.4 capabilities to SCO UNIX, and I think
that is far out from a company which is trying to get away from Xenix
development because it's non-standard. I've said *that* before.

  The one thing which I find most amazing about V.4 is that it doesn't
"fall dead." Even in hardware which fails frequently it seems to have a
fairly solid filesystem. The documentation, utilities, etc, all show
some signs of being new. In some cases the people who wrote the code and
documentation may have met once at a masquerade party. But it does lose
files or go down nearly as often as early releases from at least three
UNIX V.3.2 vendors. I tried two beta versions and one alpha version, and
they all felt solid, even if administration was an adventure.

  I think the decision to wait for a stable V.4 was a bad one, but SCO
has a big chunk of the market and makes a lot of money, and for Joe User
in an office trying to *run* software instead of *develop* software,
something like Xenix make sense. It's small, fast, reliable, and supports
lots of peripherals and software.

  I like the Dell V.4, the release tape looks like a dump of a hacker's
system, with all the GNU stuff, pbm, etc, as well as the basic AT&T
stuff. It's not without teething pains, but I still like it.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me