oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu (Oliver Sharp) (02/08/91)
About a month ago, I posted a request for information about the various 386 Unix flavors. I asked about recommended motherboard/disk combinations, as well as whether a 386 Unix makes a good X development environment. As promised, here is the summary of responses that I got. Rather than simply include the text of the responses, I edited them to cut down on bandwidth. Many thanks to everyone who replied, and I hope this helps some people ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- First question: what motherboard to choose carroll@cs.uiuc.edu: I don't have a motherboard preference - I've run UNIX on several different motherboards, with (to me) no noticeable difference. From: mra%srchtec.uucp@mathcs.emory.edu (Michael Almond) AMI motherboards/BIOS cause the least problems and are worth the extra $100 or so you may pay for an AMI board (not just one with the BIOS). From: andy@xwkg.icom.com (Andrew H. Marrinson) We have had good luck with a variety of motherboards, but our current favorites seem to be AIR and Soyo. (Then again, I could be out of date here. Every week it seems we get a new Mboard in with some amazing new combination of fast processor/more cache/etc.) Next question: recommended drive/controller combinations carroll@cs.uiuc.edu: I like my Adaptec SCSI / Maxtor Drive combo though. I recommend that combination. It's reliable, and it delivers. From: mra%srchtec.uucp@mathcs.emory.edu (Michael Almond) SCSI drives work very well under Unix (Conner is my choice, Seagate is cheap and loud). From: andy@xwkg.icom.com (Andrew H. Marrinson) On disk controllers/drives I do have some definite opinions. We are very much in the SCSI camp here. You just can't beat it in my opinion. You will hear people say for a given drive ESDI is the faster interface. That may be, but some day you are going to want to hook up a CDROM, or other relatively exotic device, and then SCSI becomes a great idea! besides, you can hook up a tape drive without using another slot. For more than one disk drive SCSI can often be as fast or faster than ESDI too, since overlapped seeks fall out of the SCSI spec. (That's more of a win for multi-user boxes granted.) Now to the drives. A few years ago (here I go again), the answer was easy: CDC/Imprimis. Now Seagate has bought Imprimis. Now that of itself isn't the end of the world, although I was skeptical about Seagate. Lately, though, I've had a lot of Imprimis drives fail on me in nasty and completely fatal ways. This happened two or three times in quick succession in about a month's time. We've been steadily replacing our Wren's ever since. Now no drive lasts forever under continuous use, and maybe it was just these drive's times. Whatever, my alternatives to CDC are HP and Fujitsu. Remember that we are skewed somewhat towards the high-end here. HP in particular, I think, concentrates on large-capacity drives. Both HP and Fujitsu offer longer warranty periods than Imprimis (that should have been Imprimis not CDC up there, sorry). I now have a Fujitsu 600MB drive here at home (yes I am spoiled) and it is the best drive I've ever had. Much faster than anything I've used before. At least Fujitsu probably makes smaller capacity drives. I'd definitely look into them. I think they are worth any higher price. anonymous: Get an RLL or ESDI disk/controller combination. Use the WD ESDI card WITH A ROM. Final question: which flavor of UNIX supports X development well From: carroll@cs.uiuc.edu I've only run ISC, but it's ok for X windows development. I did a lot of Epoch development work on a '386 running ISC Unix with X. What really cripples X on '386 is the VGA card, not the X implementation. It's not vendor dependent - the VGA architecture is just wrong for running X, and no X implementation is going to get around that. From: mra%srchtec.uucp@mathcs.emory.edu (Michael Almond) You'll need at least 4/6MB of memory, 8MB for X Windows. Get a decent monitor for X, 15 inches or greater. You can get an OptiQuest 15" monitor for about $750. SCO sucks. Dell very good. $995 Interactive has moved too far away from the standard. UHC good support, great documentation. $1200 From: andy@xwkg.icom.com (Andrew H. Marrinson) For X, the best is still Interactive. That's unfortunate, because their technical support is the pits. They also have some problems with their TCP/IP that can be annoying (see the closed sockets thread in this newsgroup) if that is important. If you want BSD compatibility I urge you to look into V.4. We just got this a week ago, and while it might be a bit premature I am very impressed. ..... For what you want, I suspect you will be very frustrated with SCO's C2. It's just too different. Their X is also one of the worst around. Interactive has the best X I know of for the 386, but I hate to send any business their way because they really are mean bastards when you try to tell them about bugs in their system. Both SCO and ISC, being V.3 based lack many of the BSDisms you probably want. V.4, on the other hand, has all the BSDisms you want. The problem here is getting a decent X environment. We have Dell, which supplies a version of X that seems to be based on Thomas Roell's older server (the one before he added 1024x768x256 support). The biggest problem we've had is that it reads the monitor ID pins to determine if it should start in 800x600 mode. Since most people use multi-sync monitors rather than fixed frequency monitors like IBM sold, that ends up meaning it is difficult to use the higher-res modes. (A hacked cable should solve the problem, but the id pins are not documented. We are going to build a cable with switches and experiment to find the right pins.) Dell also tends to want you to buy their hardware. They have been more helpful than I expected despite the fact that we use our own hardware, however. On the plus side, Dell's server is 11R4, and includes shared libraries including Motif and Xview (plus the standards). I haven't tried compiling any X programs yet. There are other V.4 vendors out there. Some of them are selling the X11/NeWs server, others are sellling AT&T's XWIN, which is a rather crummy implementation and I don't think it is X11R4 yet. One in particular, UHC, is selling the NeWs based server with both Motif and Open Look (the latter I think including XView). UHC is a bit pricey though. Less pricey is Microport. I have no idea where they stand on X. I have a basic dislike for Microport, and it is worth noting that they have reorganized under Chapter 11 once already. Intel also sells a V.4, but I wouldn't buy software from them on a bet. Again, a personal bias dating from the dark ages. From: staff@cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) Since you say you don't have any equipment yet, do not make the mistake of assuming that a 386-based solution is the most cost-effective, or even necessarily the cheapest, one. Sun sells Sparcstation/SLC's for $5000, list; Data General sells one model of Aviion for $4000, list; Acorn also has cheap RISC workstations with sparkling pure BSD 4.3 on them. These are all machines with CPU's that are generally equal to, or better than, a 486 (depends on your mix of integer/fp needs), with no or little discs but far superior screens (large, hi-res, well architected) and buses, SCSI for roll-your-own mass storage expansion, FULL OS licenses included in the price... do look around. Another interesting approach is the used-workstation market; a friend just purchased a not-so-old IBM RT risc ws for $2000 *complete*, and I hear Sun/3's are also abundant and cheap; these will NOT give you as much CPU horsepower as a good 386+387 solution, but they may be cheaper! ------------------------------------------------------------------- That's it. Thanks again for the replies! Cheers, - Oliver Sharp oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu