[net.micro.68k] info on 68K Unix-lookalikes

biggers@topaz.ARPA (Mark Biggers) (01/23/85)

Hello,

Now that there seems to be a trend toward more reasonably priced
68000-based personal micros (e.g. the new ataris, mac, etc), it
might be a good time to get some feedback from knowledgable people
about some of the available Unix-lookalike OS's available.

Recent ads in UNIX World and UNIX Review, among other mags,
have mentioned OS/9 68000 and TSC's Uniflex.  Would anyone
be willing to comment on these systems, with regard to such topics as:

	1) portability to new machines (personal experience
	with the above OS's would be good to share), ease of
	writing device drivers, company support for ports

	2) performance on "minimal" hardware (meaning no memory
	management, 256K or so bytes of memory, floppy-based
	file systems...)

	3) any other pertinent comments - software tools available
	with the standard package, quality of C (and other langs)
	compilers available, application support - you get the idea

I have experience with porting Whitesmith's Idris to the Sage IV
and Sage II, so I am not new to this.  Mail to me or this newsgroup,
my address is (I think, I am new to USENET)

seismo!rutopaz!biggers

robert@gitpyr.UUCP (Robert Viduya) (01/24/85)

I, too, would like to know about Unix(tm) ports to a 68000 based machine.  I'm
considering one of the Sage computers but I would like to know what versions
of Unices (is the the proper plural form?) are available.  However, I would
prefer a 'real' Unix, 4.2BSD preferably.  I've found that these 'lookalikes'
tend to leave out some of the more nicer features of the operating system.

				robert
-- 
Robert Viduya
    Office of Computing Services
    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA 30332
    Phone:  (404) 894-4669

...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,masscomp,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!robert
...!{rlgvax,sb1,uf-cgrl,unmvax,ut-sally}!gatech!gitpyr!robert

jbn@wdl1.UUCP (01/26/85)

     Without memory management things are bad on a M68000.  You get to
swap for every process switch, unless all the processes are linked into
the proper places at load time by some kludge.  The Chromatics, a very early
UNIX system, ran IDRIS, a very early M68000 UNIX port, in this way.  Miserable.
Sadly, an 8088 with no MMU is in some ways easier to deal with than a M68000
with no MMU.

hes@ecsvax.UUCP (Henry Schaffer) (01/31/85)

s/Sage/Stride/