ESIX neophyte has questions

[John Wilkes]

I recently installed ESIX rev. D, and being new to i386 systems, I have
some questions.

1. I got emacs to make after contacting ESIX tech support for some patches
required for (I believe) shared libraries.  However, it is built with
"CANNOT_DUMP" defined, and so must load up a bunch of elisp each time it
starts up.  Can anyone provide me with an unexec() for ESIX?

2. Gcc compiles with /bin/cc, but fails to compile itself, apparently
looping when attempting to compile c-parse.tab.c.  The stock cc compiles
this particular file pretty quickly, and I let gcc munch on it for over
eight hours.  Has anybody gotten gcc to compile itself?

3. Bash will not compile with /bin/cc, complaining of "token too long" in
builtins.c (or something like that, I forget the exact file name.)  Looks
like it chokes on a very long string constant.  I haven't really tried gcc
on bash, due to the problem described in #2 above.

4. Less will not compile.  Looks like the same sort of confusion emacs had
before the ESIX patches were applied.  It is probably a slightly old
version of less.  Any hints?  (I will admit to not having tried real hard,
and my ESIX technical documentation set is sitting in the car at this very
moment.  I may find the answer when I break open the manuals.)

5. What is "shadow ram" and do I want it enabled?  As I said, I am new to
i386 based systems, and I'm blissfully ignorant of the MS-DOS world.
Anyone who wishes to contribute to my education will earn my undying
gratitude.

Some general comments about ESIX.  Rev D has the Berkeley Fast File System
as the default.  My 25MHz 4MB system seems pretty snappy, but I have no
experience with previous ESIX releases, so I cannot comment on file system
performance improvements from FFS.  The ESIX FFS does *not* give you file
names longer than 14 characters, nor does it offer symbolic links.

I had a problem or two with X, both related to my own brain damage and
subsequent pilot error, and ESIX tech support was very helpful.  And they
didn't charge me for it.  ;-) Now, if I could just find online man pages,
nroff, and ksh, I'd be happy!
-- 

John Wilkes

wilkes at mips.com   -OR-   {ames, decwrl, pyramid}!mips!wilkes