daniel@island.uu.net (Dan Smith "Nightmare on Elway Street") (02/02/90)
[in case this has been covered to death, Please email me at: dansmith@well.sf.ca.us or ucbcad.edu!island!daniel] My wife (sprice@well.sf.ca.us) and I are putting together a 386 for home, and have a couple of questions. First off, here's our hardware list: 33 Mhz 386 w/64k cache on a Mylex motherboard with AMI bios 4 meg ram, probably 70 ns (to start) ESDI controller w/Toshiba 300 Meg drive (sorry don't know model numbers at the moment) Paradise 16 bit VGA w/512k -- 1024x768 Microsoft bus mouse Northgate (OMNI) 101 keyboard 2 ser/1 par ports NEC 4D monitor we'll need to get a tape backup (definitely!)...I want to get a 1/4" drive in order to be compatible with Sun 1/4" (I'm assuming that "tar" or any other standard utility on a 386 Unix will be compatible with SunOS versions....hmmm, perhaps I should not assume so much! now, for software... I'm confused as to whether to go with ESIX, Interactive Systems, or SCO (further confused as to difference between SCO Xenix and SCO Unix!) We want something that's going to be compatible with the above hardware (we can still make changes in the hardware list, that's no problem), obviously, and something that can run X11R4, possibly with Motif. I lean towards ESIX because of price and Xenix binary compatibility. Oh, and one other thing...my wife wants to have OS/2 and DOS partitions on this (yea, I know...we have this constant teasing at home of Unix vs OS/2, X vs PM...that 300 meg doesn't seem like it's going to be enough!). Is it feasible to set up the machine to boot into one of 3 environments? It's possible that we could get another disk so that one would be all Unix, and the other one would be split between OS/2 and DOS... So I ask for your opinions: which Unix? what hardware changes would you make? My thanks in advance. dan -- dansmith@well.sf.ca.us daniel@island.uu.net unicom!daniel@pacbell.com ph: (415) 332 3278 (h), 491 1000 (w) disclaimer: Island's coffee was laced :-)