Which UNIX?

[Stephen H. Underwood]

I worked at a company for about 2 years that used nothing but SCO for
it's unix, and while there I ported/attempted to port quite a few
standard unix programs.  In general I found that the system was awful,,
laden with kludges, and a lot of standard packages contain disclaimer
lines in them that say "If you are attempting to port this to Xenix,
good luck, and tell us if you get it to work."  

When I purchased my own system, I desided tro try Esix.  The support is
not quite as good as the support you can buy from SCO, but it's free,
and most of us can't afford to buy a support licence.  The operating
system in general was MUCH more compatable with sysv on the whole, and I
was able to port even the most difficult package with relative ease.

What you give up are on line man pages, a little memory, and some disk
space, as it's not quite as tight as SCO.  Also the manuals will cost
you some if you don't have access to Unix manuals from elsewhere.  And
you have to give up the "brand name" of xenix. 

On the other hand you don't have to give up a large application base, as
you can run xenix binaries on an Esix system, and can install most Xenix
application packages on Esix (anything that does not require a kernel
rebuild.)  Personally I would rather be running Esix than Xenix, even if
they cost the same.

(diskclaimer - I don't work for Esix, and don't know anyone who does, I
just like their product.)
Stephen H. Underwood                 The Heechee          The Nephron 
su11 at andrew.cmu.edu         "The colliflour has nothing to say to you."