some miscellaneous AUX questions

[John Coolidge]

hansm at duteca8.et.tudelft.nl (Hans Mulder) writes:
>I am about to purchase A/UX for my Mac II and still have a couple
>of questions left:

>	1. how much memory do you recommend?
>	   I have 5M and am planning to upgrade to 8M

I went to 8M really quickly :-).

>	   (is it possible to use 4M simms in a II?)

No. There are a couple of NuBus memory boards, but at least one (the
National Semi) is rumored to not work with A/UX 2.0 anyway.

>	2. do I have other options than buying the M68851?
>	   e.g. a simple 68030 card or a real accelerator?
>	   which work, which don't work with A/UX?
>	   what are the prices of the different options?

I hope someone answers this affirmatively (for something in my price
range; once the accelerator gets over $1k I'm better off saving my
pennies for the IIfx upgrade :-)). I tried the Dove Marathon '030
with a beta and had no luck, but it turns out that at that point my
machine wasn't ready for A/UX anyway (too old a motherboard, A/UX
complained about archaic versions of I/O system or some such).

>	3. how will A/UX perform on my Mac II?
>	   relative to, for example, a sun 3/60?

I've found it to be a bit faster than a sun 3/60 depending on the
task. The big loss is that Mac II's don't have DMA hardware, so you
lose on I/O. Computationally they're equivalent, and the OS seems to
be a bit tighter than SunOS 4.x (then again, little isn't...).

>	4. is there an update for 2.0 due soon?

2.0.1 is supposed to be out next spring. I haven't heard what the
update policy will be.

>	5. where can I find A/UX archives?
>	   with news-net discussions?
>	   X11R4 A/UX patches?
>	   etc. ?

aux.support.apple.com has an archive of comp.unix.aux postings and
a number of patches (supported and unsupported). I'm maintaining an
archive at wuarchive.wustl.edu that has a bunch of Gnu tools, the
X11R4 binaries and patches, and occasionally other stuff.

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge at cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1990 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well.