tss@beta.lanl.gov (Timothy S Sullivan) (09/18/89)
The system: An Everex 386/20 with a CDC Wren III 165 MB, 16.7 ms, ESDI hard drive, 2 MB RAM, ATI VGAWonder card, NEC Multisync 2A monitor, 2 floppies. The purpose: Primarily a single user system to control experiments using IEEE-488 and a video image capture card (neither board purchased yet). Secondarily to connect with an existing Sun network over Ethernet (board also yet to be bought). The angst: All of the above could be done under DOS with existing, spiffy products, but I hate to see the potential of such a machine wasted on a single process operating system. Besides, I like to use UNIX. The questions: 1) Is there anything about the above configuration that would prevent me from choosing SCO Unix or ISC 386/ix? 2) One of the big worries about choosing Unix is the availability of device drivers especially for devices that don't have anything to do with business systems. Does anybody know of existing device drivers for IEEE-488 cards or image capture cards for either SCO or ISC? 3) For instrument control it would be extremely handy to have real time extensions. VenturCom produces such a package for 386/ix. Is there such a package for SCO Unix/Xenix? Does anyone have experience with the VenturCom package? 4) Is it realistic to run X Windows as the window system for this machine? Can one pop-up a VP/ix window under X (like one can under Suntools on the Sun 386i)? 5) I expect to be doing a lot of C programming to automate the experiment I'm running. Is there a big difference in the programming environment between SCO and ISC? 6) Is this possible? Lets imagine that I can't find a device driver for the image capture card, but that I buy 386/ix with VenturCom's real time extensions. Could I write a program using the DOS device driver, and run it under VP/ix and give it real-time priority with the VenturCom extensions? (When I asked somebody at VenturCom about this he hemmed and hawed quite a bit.) Is VP/ix a task just like any other Unix task? 7) I consider myself a reasonably competent Unix user, but my system administration experience to date has been to figure out UUCP on a HP9000/520 and get it to talk over a modem to a Sun 3, to add users and other minor things like that. Am I crazy to consider getting so involved with Unix? Thanks for taking the time to get this far. Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Please post responses to the net if you think this is of general interest. Otherwise I would appreciate Internet email at tss@lanl.gov . Tim Sullivan
herbert@ektools.UUCP (Tom Herbert) (09/27/89)
In article <32258@beta.lanl.gov> tss@beta.lanl.gov (Timothy S Sullivan) writes: > >2) One of the big worries about choosing Unix is the availability of >device drivers especially for devices that don't have anything to >do with business systems. Does anybody know of existing device drivers >for IEEE-488 cards or image capture cards for either SCO or ISC? > There is a German board, called ines with a driver for Interactive 386/ix version 2.0.x. I do not know who is the US distributor for this board for we purchased it through a German subcontractor. Here is their address: ines - Innovative Elektronik-Systeme Neuenhofer Allee 45 D - 5000 Koln 41 West Germany This board should coexist with an intelligent ethernet controller board such as the Micom np600 running DECnet or TCP/IP. We run ours with DECnet. >4) Is it realistic to run X Windows as the window system for this >machine? Can one pop-up a VP/ix window under X (like one can under >Suntools on the Sun 386i)? Yes, vpix can run on any terminal, a "real" terminal, a virtual pty such as an xterm window or a rlogin or telnet session. You may be limited to text only output since it is running under terminal emulation when it is running in an xterm window. Putting up vpix on your 386/ix system with NFS running, provides a DOS server for any user on any other system on the network that is running from the same NFS server. > Tim Sullivan Also Tim, you will like Unix alot better than DOS for running multi-protocals such as tcp/ip and IEEE488 simultaneously. --TFH herbert@kodak.com ..!rochester!kodak!herbert Tom Herbert Signal Processing Dept. MS 35908 Eastman Kodak Co. Rochester, N.Y. 14653