IBM-PC's running unix as diskless work-stations?

[Don Coleman]

The Institute for Cognitive Science here at UCSD has started a new project.
The project is to modify a group of around 70 IBM-pc's to run unix as diskless
work-stations for an introductory Pascal programming course, over a 1 Mbit/sec 
Omninet.  
   We currently are evaluating XENIX as a possible version of unix to use, and 
we are interested in evaluating various others.

    What we would like to know is:

      a) What versions of unix exist(in all its various flavors, v7-4.2bsd) for
      the IBM-pc? I already know about pc/ix, xenix, idris, coherent and venix.

      b) What are the advantages of one version over the others, in terms of
      supported utilities and enhancements like csh and termcap?  I already have
      a fair idea of the comparison between xenix and pc/ix, both through the
      available literature and through a couple articles already submitted to
      the net, but how about the others?

      c) Some sort of comparison of the performance characteristics of the 
      various systems.  The work-stations are limited to around 256K.  We would
      like to use pc's as file servers also, but they would have to serve
      many disc requests fast!

      d) Is there anything we can strip out to make them run faster?  These
      will be single user work-stations, things like cron and uucp are not
      really required.

      e) Is source available for a reasonable fee, keeping in mind that we
      already have 4.2, and possibly other, source licenses?  The need for
      source is basicly to enable us to install our own device drivers, so
      this could be solved just by the availability of the proper .o and .h
      modules, plus some sort of skeleton device driver layouts.

      f) How do we go about getting evaluation copies?  We already have an
      evaluation copy of XENIX, through the grace of the Santa Cruz Operation.

      f) What sort of pascal compilers are available?  What we need is a very
      fast compiler, but we could care less about the quality of produced
      code. 

I will summarise all responses in a few weeks to net.micro.ibm-pc.  I would
greatly appreciate any help anyone could give us.

     Thanks,

       -- Don

       sdcsvax!coleman at berkeley.arpa
       [ ihnp4|decvax|ittvax|ucbvax ]!sdcsvax!coleman.uucp


-- 
---
don 						"The Back to Hack Kid"
   coleman at sdcsvax.ucsd
   sdcsvax!coleman at berkely.arpa
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