goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) (02/17/91)
Question about home systems: I've been a very satisfied Xenix user for some time now. Never had much trouble getting software up under it. What with some of the socket emulation software that's recently been posted, this even goes for the very BSDish code which I often want to move homeward. It turns out now that my sister and brother-in-law want to do likewise. They'll be getting a 25Mhz 386-based VGA system with 4 megabytes and no numeric coprocessor. They'll almost surely not be using things like TCP/IP, and probably not even X. They will, however, require a development system. They can probably get by with groff and PD man systems in place of a text processing system. The question is this: What flavor of UNIX should they be thinking about for 1, possibly 2, users? They are not hackers, and so sim- plicity of installation and maintenance will be a plus. Great secur- ity features will not be much of a concern. They may want a news feed at some point. Certainly they don't want to pay for a lot of extras they'll never use. Any comments would be much appreciated. -Richard (goer@sohist.uchicago.edu)