A Cheap UNIX clone ?

[Oreo Cat]

Before I start off, what ever happened to the coherent mailing list idea?
Or possibly a newsgroup?  I just got Coherent a few weeks ago, and due to
the low price and large number of problems with it, I would imagine there
could be quite a bit of discussion on this system...

So if there is such a mailing list, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know.  If
there isn't then I'm willing to start one as soon as I get hooked up to
uunet.  Send me mail if interested.  If there are enough people interested
in the mailing list, then I'll propose a newsgroup for it.

As you can see by my signature below, I'm going to be running a BBS under
Coherent soon.  I was hoping I'd be able to just get up and going
immediately, but it's not that easy...

In article <4241 at peora.ccur.com> tran at peora.ccur.com (Nhan Tran) writes:
>In article <12 at tdw205.ed.ray.com>, heiser at sud509.ed.ray.com (Bill Heiser - Unix Sys Admin) writes:
>| In article <57528 at bbn.BBN.COM> bpalmer at BBN.COM (Brian Palmer) writes:
>| >In the May 90 issue of Byte, was an ad for an OS called Coherent from the
>| >Mark Williams Company.  It claims to be "a virtual clone of UNIX" with
>| >
>| >This sounds too good to be true.  Has anyone bought a copy?  Would
>| >someone care to comment.  Could this be a reasonable home UNIX system?
>| >
>| 
>| There are things it doesn't do (large model compiler, swapping, etc),
>| but the answer is probably "yes" to your question about it being a reasonable
>| home unix system ... depending on what you want to use it for.
>| 

According to the manual, it does have swapping.  I haven't tried it yet as
I have 4 megs of memory, and with it only supporting the small memory 
model, I'm a LONG way from using up all my memory.

>  If I don't program,  if I am probably the only user, if I don't run any
>major program,  the only thing I use it for is to send/receive mail (a mailing
>list server), would this system be ok?

Probably.  It has uucp.  I haven't tried it yet, but it seems pretty
complete.  If you are used to the Berkeley mail program, the mail program in
Coherent will really have you pulling out your hair!  But it is definetly
workable for this purpose.

The biggest problem is it not supporting the large memory model.  Most of
the other problems I've encountered could be fixed easily by just compiling
the public domain source for whatever Coherent is missing.  But most of
the stuff out there just doesn't fit in the small memory model.  I've
heard that it's possible to get gcc running under Coherent.  If this is
true, would I be able to compile larger codes this way???  

The major problems I've found:
	only SMALL memory model
	no csh
	compress only works with 12 bit compression, 16 is standard
	no berkeley mail
	the manual is incomplete, and has a lot of errors
	MicroEMACS can't edit large files
	lots of little incompatibilities with real unix
	no caching
	... (I have a list at home of more, but these are the ones I've
	thought of offhand).

The good thing about it is that it doesn't have vi.  This turns out to be a
real blessing, as MicroEMACS is a LOT easier to use than vi.

Overall it seems like a very good system.  The installation was fairly
painless.  It recognizes all of my extended memory except the stuff 
between 640k-1024k.  It runs pretty fast on my 12Mhz 286.  It formatted
the second partition on my disk, leaving the first for MS-DOS, but booting
from the Coherent partition as default (or if you press 0 during the
boot, you get MS-DOS).  It could be such a good system if they had only
spent some more time working out it's problems.

Jim Lick               | Inet: jim at piggy.ucsb.edu
6657 El Colegio #24    | UUCP: uunet!piggy.ucsb.edu!jim
Isla Vista, CA 93117   | Work: University of California Santa Barbara
(805) 968-0189 (voice) |       Mechanical Engineering, 2311 Engineering II 
(805) 968-2734 (msg)   |       (805) 961-4113 (839-4113 after 8-4-90)
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