tody@noao.edu (Doug Tody X217) (02/01/90)
From article <6787@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>, by ee299bw@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way): > My question is: what exactly is A/UX, and what does it buy you. A/UX is unix. It will give you what any other good unix system gives you. Seriously, this is a fairly difficult question to answer if you aren't already familiar with unix. If you don't know why you need unix, probably you don't need it. > Can you still run generic mac software, MacOS applications written according to standard will run under A/UX, but many do not (or so I hear). But you can always shutdown unix and run MacOS if you need to do that for a while. > how "good" a unix is it (ie how does it compare to BSD unix). I think it is a very good unix implementation, especially considering what it offers for its size. I have run into a few bugs but then that is always the case. I could wish for more features, but then everything would scale up, and the Mac is a small system. All I can say is that I have worked extensively with unix for ten years or more, on many systems, and my opinion is that A/UX is a good unix implementation. I think the team that worked on it must actually like unix, which didn't have to be the case. > Does it give you real > multitasking (unlike MultiFinder). Is it even a real operating > system (unlike MultiFinder, heh heh heh)? Does it require lots of > other peripherals to work properly? A/UX is UNIX (they say Sys V unix but there is much of BSD in there too). UNIX, of course, is a real operating system, multitasking, multiuser, and more. To run it all you need is an 80 Mb disk, at least a couple Mb of RAM, and memory management hardware (the PMU, which is included with most recent systems). Whether or not you will need lots of peripherals depends upon what you want to do with the system. If you want to do much you will need more disk, more memory, a larger screen, ... Eventually you may need a larger system than a Mac, but if you already have Macs adding A/UX may be a good way to start gaining some exposure to unix. Learning unix can have tremendous payoffs, but it is not a task to be undertaken lightly. -- Doug Tody, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson AZ, 602-325-9217 UUCP: {arizona,decvax,ncar}!noao!tody or uunet!noao.edu!tody Internet: tody@noao.edu SPAN/HEPNET: NOAO::TODY (NOAO=5355)
ee299bw@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way) (02/02/90)
In article <1990Feb1.054457.13492@noao.edu> tody@noao.edu (Doug Tody X217) writes: >From article <6787@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>, by ee299bw@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way): >> My question is: what exactly is A/UX, and what does it buy you. > >A/UX is unix. It will give you what any other good unix system gives you. >Seriously, this is a fairly difficult question to answer if you aren't >already familiar with unix. If you don't know why you need unix, probably >you don't need it. Well, I used unix all through college (and loved it) and survived using VMS at my last job, and now I'm in an a near-exclusively Mac environment. I think in many ways that Mac is a great machine, but there's other stuff that just aggravates the hell out of me. The Mac operating system is a total joke. The setting application memory size via the Info box is just plain stupid. Neither the System nor applications can ask for memory on-the-fly (other than their limited heap areas), MultiFinder is not always successful in running applications in the background, applications crashes often cause system crashes... and so on. Hence my AUX question. However, the Mac also has many strengths: the standardization of some features across applications, the big screen on my mac (MegaGraphics 19") required NO reconfiguration of .STUPID files, most of the applications are quite good, Networking Macs is a piece of cake (at least at AppleTalk speeds)... the list goes on. I was hoping that AU/X would buy me out of the other annoyances, not to mention allow two or possibly three users to share a Mac.... -- Who: Dave Chesavage Where: dchesavage@ucsd.edu Disclaimer: "If you get confused listen to the music play"
liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts) (02/03/90)
In article <6845@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> ee299bw@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way) writes: >However, the Mac also has many strengths: the standardization >of some features across applications, the big screen on my mac >(MegaGraphics 19") required NO reconfiguration of .STUPID files, >most of the applications are quite good, Networking Macs is a piece >of cake (at least at AppleTalk speeds)... the list goes on. I was >hoping that AU/X would buy me out of the other annoyances, not to >mention allow two or possibly three users to share a Mac.... The screen stuff does work under A/UX, without any .STUPID files. You still get the stpuid behaviour if you run an Application on a big screen (we have the Apple 2 Page displays) then go back to an ordinary Mac II screen and the grow box is off the screen so you can't make the window any smaller :-) Networking Macs is still probably easy, IF you buy "AppleTalk for A/UX" or "EtherTalk for A/UX" - these may be different things. **** APPLE: WHY HAVE YOU UNBUNDLED THIS STUFF? ***** Networking Unix machines normally means TCP/IP and so you have all of the hassles with choosing a network number (even if you only have one network) and choosing node numbers and maintaining hosts lists. RARP helps a little but not much. AppleTalk over Ethernet runs at Ethernet speeds but with standard Mac ease of networking. >two or possibly three users to share a Mac.... Then it's not "personal computing" :-) Actually this is technically feasible since you can add more mice and keyboards to ADB, a Mac II has lots of slots for extra video cards, but the snag would be getting more A/UX consoles to work and having multiple mac applications which don't share anything much. I don't expect Apple will lose sleep over this... -- William Roberts ARPA: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam@qmw-cs.UUCP Mile End Road AppleLink: UK0087 LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Tel: 01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)