Berkeley Utilities and other Questions.

[Aldo Villa]

Facing the prospective purchase of a personal (laptop/transportable to be
precise, but this has little importance here), I have since a long time been
involved in the effort of trying to understand differences and similarities
between the various UNIX-clones. May be because I'm not a computer scientist,
and may be also because my dedication hasn't been consistent enough, I haven't
yet shed so much light on the topic.

Any book on UNIX will introduce the reader to this O.S. mentioning that there
are two basic versions of UNIX: UNIX system V by AT&T and UNIX B.S.D. from
the computer science department of the Univ. of California at Berkeley.

A part from the fact that there are various releases of these two versions
already, but when you go to the commercially available versions of UNIX, then 
the field expands almost with no limits.

I have read of the following clones:

1) UNIX system V release 3.2 by AT&T
2) UNIX system V release 4.01 by AT&T
3) ESIX by Everest (sp?)
4) XENIX from SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) 
5) UNIX from SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) 
6) Open Desktop from SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) 
7) UNIX-AIX from IBM
8) UNIX-SUN 4.01/2 from Sun MicroSystems Corporation
9) UNIX from Interactive
10) UNIX-Intel (previously Bell-UNIX) release 3.2 (??) 
11) UNIX-Intel (previously Bell-UNIX) release 4.0.(??) 
12) UNIX-AUX for Mac computers
13) UNIX-ULTRIX (for Hewlett-Packard micros?)

I'm somehow discouraged by all the above; and I'm even more discouraged when
I read of the attempts to standardize UNIX worldwide; but then it comes out
that there are two of these standardization consortiums; actually, not true:
they are three: OH MY GOD, WHAT A MESS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I won't understand the whole story before I'll be at retirement age, but
in the meantime ............

COULD SOMEBODY, PLEASE, GIVE ME AN ADVICE.

I want at least the most plane-jane of the Berkeley utilities (vi-editor,
C-shell, job-controls) and not so much more. I want an efficient and fast
DOS-emulator to run some common DOS software when convenience and necessity
will arise. Finally, I want a really wysiwyg PostScript previewer in order to 
avoid having to go mad and waste time and toner and paper printing out
everything many times: even more times when there are tbl-formatted tables and
eqn-formatted equations. So, ........

1) WHAT OPERATING SYSTEM SHOULD I BUY ???

2) COULD YOU ADVICE ME ANYTHING TO READ WHICH WOULD OFFER A DIRECT COMPARISON
(similarities+differences) and which would shed some light on the whole
big mess?

3) DO YOU KNOW OF ANY PAPER OFFERING A COMPARISON AMONG THE VARIOUS *NIX?
BETWEEN MS-DOS and UNIXES?

Finally:

4) IS IT TOO MUCH TO PRETEND TO HAVE A PRODUCT COMPLETELY (or almost)
DEBUGGED?  

I have been using BSD 4.2; then BSD 4.3; and now SUN 4.02 (on a SUN 3.60). 
Three versions, two enhancements: and despite this I continue to
struggle with problems such as: 

a) The macros -ms has a notorious bug which takes certain commands (setting 
page margins) to start action only since the second page of the document; 
this translates in very hard-to-solve problems in case of sophisticated 
formatting ...... 

b) tbl interacts in an idiosyncratic way with -ms (I recently discovered that 
the many troubles that I have always been having with "tbl" are due to this 
interaction: I owe a "Thank you" to some expert down in the netland who helped 
me out on this) and this translates in even harder-to-solve problems.

So many UNIX-clones, ...., and so trivial problems still around .............

Can I hope to find something already cleaned-up?

		     Thanks everybody in advance:
						  Aldo.

P.S. Forgive me for the cross-posting, but I'm at the limit of my ability to
stand frustrations in this field.