What does one get into when buying a Unix PC?

[Bruce Becker]

In article <2677 at cveg.uucp> f0057 at uafhp.uucp (James E. Ward) writes:
|Hello out there.  I've just read every article available to me in this
|newsgroup.  I have an Atari 520 ST and really lust after Unix.  I see
|that there are 7300 Unix-pc machines available for under $1000 complete
|with Unix System V.  I am considering purchasing one, but would like to
|get some feel for what I am getting into before I leap.  I understand
|that I may soon outgrow .5 meg RAM and 20 meg of disk space, and that
|the machine is slow.  How slow is slow?  My definition of slow: the original
|IBM PC.  Is it that slow?

	The UNIX-PC is a wonderful bargain. You won't do better
	in terms of price/performance at the low end.

	The 20 Mb disk is too small, but it is easily replaced.
	0.5 Mb memory is also too small, but is not so easily
	added (it depends on how handy you are with hardware).

	The machine is definitely not slow. It uses a 68010
	running at 10 MHz, and it is certainly much faster
	than a Mac SE or an Amiga running the same kind of
	tasks. Subjectively it is quite impressive how much
	relative performance there is.

|Also, an Internet node is a local call away.  What kind of connectivity to
|Usenet and the rest of the world can I get with a 2400 baud modem?  Am I
|too ignorant to get into this machine?

	Ignorance is by definition self-limiting - don't
	worry about it. 2400 baud is reasonable for connectivity.
	The O'Reilly Nutshell handbooks are very useful;
	you can ask for a catalog from "nuts at ora.uucp".

|Should I buy the latest release of the os, or get the discounted previous
|release?

	You should obtain the most recent release of Unix for
	the machine, which is called version 3.51. It is
	essentially System V release 2 with some release 3
	stuff & some Berkely stuff in it. It comes with the
	Korn shell, which is pretty nice.

|I have been a user on a Unix system for several years, and I once had an
|IBM PC/AT with a Xenix partition.  I set it up and administered it, allowed
|buds to dial-up and login.  Have I much more or less to accomplish with this
|machine?

	Probably similar, except the UNIX-PC has some
	window-based utilities which make maintenance
	easier (in most cases), and the O/S is certainly
	better than Xenix. It is real, full-featured
	Unix with some extensions peculiar to the machine
	like the windows and support for the built-in modem
	and phone dialer.

|Does the GNU stuff work easily?  (I am a GNU emacs fanatic!)

	Much of the Gnu stuff needs a lot of address space,
	so there is a problem for things like gcc for instance.
	There can be a maximum of 4 Mbytes of memory in the
	machine, and I believe the same maximum virtual space
	per process, of which part is ownd by the O/S.

Cheers,
-- 
   __	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ont.
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