wanted: UNIX or clone

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <1991Apr18.211830.41902 at eagle.wesleyan.edu> flinton at eagle.wesleyan.edu writes:

| Should I infer that Coherent might be a good choice for my ALR 486, given
| that it sports but 2 Meg of RAM and only 30 Meg on its HD (well, 40 Meg if
| I scrap my current 10 Meg DOS 4.01 partition) ?

  As long as you realize that it's not UNIX you are fine. I believe it
will run all V7 stuff, and some SysIII stuff. Maybe with BSD
enhancements. If you want to hack around and have fun it's fine, will
run news, etc.

  Any of the common variants based on AT&T code are going to want more
disk, and anything except Xenix will want more memory, although it
definitely will run in 2MB.

  Having run Xenix on a 286 for three years at work, I can assure you
that with proper tuning it is not the pig someone implied. The response
can be quite good, but the segmented archetecture is a pain. Not that
Coherent makes it any easier, it just restricts you to small model (this
may no longer be true).

  If you want a spiffy dead solid system for home which will give
adequate response on an XT (not great, but useful) look around for a
used copy of PC/ix, IBM's port of SysIII for XT or AT. We still have at
least two copies running at work, because they do everything the users
want, which is news and mail, UNIX utilities, and a little light C
programming.
-- 
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