don@seila.UUCP (Don Kossman) (08/25/88)
i'm trying to put together a cost-effective (read: cheap :-)) 386 box which will initially run dos but must eventually run a real 386 unix, probably bell technologies (365$ for a complete 2-user development system) or perhaps interactive systems 386/ix if i can scratch up the cash. in addition i'd like to be able to (eventually) run one of the dos/unix merge products (eg from LOCUS) and one of the smart x-windows cards (bell blit card for example). i've been talking to various mail-order houses and some local distributors, but few have experience with anything except sco 286 xenix, and they won't make any guarantees. according to people at bell technologies, many of these boxes will NOT run unix, although reasons weren't always known. for example, i was warned against using systems with micronics motherboards, or the phoenix bios, or disk controllers that take over the dos bios to get past the dos 32meg partition limit. i understand the need for 32bit memory expansion to at least 8megs, but beyond that, what questions should i ask? or has anyone gone through this and come up with a list of wills and won'ts? i've looked at the cheaper alr, everex, compuadd, dell, ccc (heritage), acer, northgate, etc. models. (16mhz/1M with a micropolis or miniscribe 71m and monochrome graphics). i'm trying to stay below 3000$. if this has not been recently discussed in this group or elsewhere, PLEASE FOLLOWUP TO COMP.UNIX.XENIX . otherwise send me mail, as i don't receive the other group. i'll summarize to the net if there is sufficient feedback. thanks! -- Don Kossman, SEI Information Technology, Los Angeles usenet: ...sun!tsunami!seila!don, ...uunet!mahendo!jplgodo!seila!don
jsp@sp7040.UUCP (John Peters) (08/30/88)
In article <374@seila.UUCP>, don@seila.UUCP (Don Kossman) writes: > i'm trying to put together a cost-effective (read: cheap :-)) 386 > box which will initially run dos but must eventually run a real > 386 unix, probably bell technologies (365$ for a complete 2-user > development system) or perhaps interactive systems 386/ix if i > can scratch up the cash. > I am running ISC and a friend is running Microport. The machines are both Everex Step 386/20's with 4 meg and Seagate ST-4096 Drives. Both have been up for just about 8 days now (brand spanking new machines). Neither one has had a problem of any kind so far. Is far as I can tell the limiting factor on both is definitely the speed of disk i/o. I'm happy as can be with it. -- Johnnie -- ps. If you have questions send mail to me: jsp@marvin or jsp@sp7040