putting a machine together, some questions

[mark hilliard]

In article <1349 at island.uu.net> daniel at island.uu.net (Dan Smith "Nightmare on Elway Street") writes:
>
>	33 Mhz 386 w/64k cache on a Mylex motherboard with AMI bios

This board has a NON-STANDARD caching system which is incompatable with MOST
dual ported memory cards.  I have extensivly tested Mylex boards and had 
BAD experiences with all of the caching boards. Some companies 
make custom work arounds for their cards to support the mylex board, 
but only a few.  I gave up on Mylex and started using AMI boards with
NO problems with caching and dual ported memory.

>	Microsoft bus mouse

Chances are that this will need one of the interrupts that your dual serial
card needs.

>	2 ser/1 par ports

You might want to consider the Megaport serial board.  This board is the 
fastest serial board around and it will work fine with the bus mouse.

>	NEC 4D monitor

Nice choice.

>	I'm confused as to whether to go with ESIX, Interactive Systems,
>or SCO (further confused as to difference between SCO Xenix and SCO Unix!)
>We want something that's going to be compatible with the above hardware
>(we can still make changes in the hardware list, that's no problem),
>obviously, and something that can run X11R4, possibly with Motif.
>
>	I lean towards ESIX because of price and Xenix binary compatibility.

Interactive (in my expierence) is a better choice.  It has Xenix binary 
compatibility as well as X11R4 and Motif (all of which I am running). It
may cost a little more, but it is a great product.  I have installed 
MANY systems with Interactive, and have always been pleased.  I have
also used SCO and thint that Interactive is a smoother product.

>	Oh, and one other thing...my wife wants to have OS/2 and
>DOS partitions on this (yea, I know...we have this constant teasing
>at home of Unix vs OS/2, X vs PM...that 300 meg doesn't seem like
>it's going to be enough!).  Is it feasible to set up the machine
>to boot into one of 3 environments?  

Yes, you can set up different partitions that you can switch between
via fdisk.  You can also mount MS-DOS partitions from within
Interactive by using the mount -f DOS command and then access the
data from unix or vpix.

Mark Hilliard
rutgers!rochester!kodak!gizzmo!mark
mark at kodak