Thinking about buying UNIX for home, be careful w/ Dell

[Paul Bash]

seth at gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Madison MadMan Miles) writes:

>First of all, I want to thank all the people who helped me with my
>decision about which UNIX to buy. However, I found out a couple of
>things the hard way the no one told me.
>After all the mail that people sent me about their opinion on which
>UNIX is the best to buy for home, I made a decision and bought one.
>I bought Dell's SYS V ver 4. Mainly because of the reason the several
>people said good things about them, and the info they sent me was
>very thorough and complete. Or at least that's what I thought. I
>decided to purchase Dells UNIX. I got it in the mail today. But to
>my surprise, It was on a 150 meg tape. Along with one 3.5" disk for
>installation. And yes, I don't own a tape drive, and no noone rents
>them. I called Dell, and they told me that this is the only way that
>they are packaging the software. MY choice, buy a tape drive or return
>UNIX. Well, I finially decided to buy a tape drive from them for $799
>I bought it from them, because I'm not an expert on tape drives and
>there are a lot of different types out there.
>Anyway, to make a long story short, instead of getting a great
>operating system for $995, like they advertise, I'm having to pay
>$1800.

Well, this is my two cents worth being a reasonably satisfied Dell SVR4
user. For your $995 you got a *good* UNIX but not a great one. I'd venture
to guess that most SVR4 systems from any distributor aren't great at this
stage of SVR4's development. In general, the number of things that don't
quite work as documented are surprising. Given that, and comparing prices
with SVR3 systems configured with the same options (TCP/IP NFS, development
tools, X11R4, documentation tools, DOS MERGE, etc) I have to admit I feel
it was a pretty good deal. Its just not quite ready for the faint at heart,
although most things work as advertised. In fact, in the last three months
I've been running Dell's offering, I've only experienced kernel panics twice
and they were both while running questionable programs under DOS MERGE. 

As for the lack of information on the requirements of the system, I had the
advantage of following this newsgroup for several months before I bought it
and had a pretty good idea of what was required (i.e. graphics limited to
DELL's GPX 34010 based board or 640x480 VGA. Period. Only ADAPTEC 1542B
SCSI controller, only Wangtek 5150 or Archive 2150S 150M SCSI tape). Since I was
putting my system together from scratch for Dell's UNIX, it was no problem.
In fact, everything has worked flawlessly in this respect. It was pretty
clear to me going into it that they only intended to support the hardware
configurations they sold under their own name, so I understood I was 
trying to circumvent this by piecing together a similar configuration through 
other vendors. To Dell's credit, this has *never* been an issue when dealing
with tech support. I've always made it clear that I did not own Dell 
hardware when dealing with them and they've always, in this respect, been
very cooperative in handling problem reports. The first person I spoke with
at Dell, when I questioned the restricted hardware requirements, even  
suggested that I buy their supported tape drive, use it to install the
system, then return it for a full refund under their 30 day satisfaction
guarantee. Do you know any other company that would give this kind of
advice (crazy as it was)?  

Given all of that, I have to admit some things have really been bothering
me. Not only that, I'm going to vent a little steam here.

1) The system has been shipping since (I think) last November. They 
   recently shipped an update tape to address a number of problems.  
   While the tape was pretty cheap at $50, they still have the *stupid*
   lack of support for Super-VGA graphic modes under X. I have a 1024x768
   256 color graphics rig (NEC 4D, STB PowerGraph VGA) coasting along at 
   640x480 16 color waiting for these guys to get their act together. 
   Give me a break! If Thomas Roell can produce his *configurable* 
   X server on his own time, surely these people can do it with all 
   of Dell's resources.  Excuse me if this is a little abrasive, but
   this is a pet peave of mine (and kudos to Thomas).

2) Some of the X clients provided (X.desktop in particular) still have
   major problems. Anyone who tried to use them would see what I mean. 
   For example, the X.desktop scrolling of icons within a window is broken.   
   Period (i.e. the icons very obviously overlay one another producing a 
   mess on-screen). Why wasn't this fixed on the update tape?  

3) BSD compatibility is pretty poor. Maybe this is a problem in general with
   SVR4 but its something that anyone considering the system should consider.
   If you want BSD (or SUN) compatibility, look elsewhere. Paraphrasing a Dell 
   employee, "whoever wrote this stuff has never worked with BSD". 
   Compatiblity did improve on the recent update tape, but not greatly. 
  
4) Modem support is, at best, strange. Carrier Detect must be forced high.
   If you don't do this in the modem's non-volatile memory, you won't be 
   able to use the modem. I pointed out to Dell's tech support that this
   presents a problem for those of us using AT-bus internal modems. Let's   
   say I have an internal modem that doesn't have CD forced high. If your
   UNIX device driver won't talk to it unless CD is high, how do you expect
   to tell it to force it high (if you don't have external switches). 
   Sounds like catch-22 to me. The answer I got from Dell's tech support
   was that, obviously (??), you just have to force CD high. When I 
   pointed out that this was impossible, given the fact I couldn't 
   write to the modem, I was told that this was "how it works" and that
   getting the development group to change it to work otherwise would
   be difficult since "they are pretty busy". Luckily, I was able to 
   boot MSDOS and run Telix to change the modem settings. Hmm. the 
   whole point of going to UNIX was to get away from "limited" 
   os's like MSDOS.  

5) Major support is done through support contracts (at $500/yr for the 
   unlimited user version I have). I have no problem with paying extra 
   for preferred support. I didn't pay because I feel I can wait a little
   extra time to get answers to problems and that I can figure out the
   RTFM problems by myself by Reading The ****ing Manual. I've been relying 
   on email to support at uudel.dell.com for problem resolution and it has
   worked reasonably well (kudos to Steve Blair for his enthusiastic
   help). What bothers me is that several of the points raised in this
   posting were raised in email to Dell and were apparently ignored. I 
   understand that uucp mail can be unreliable, but this has happened 
   more than once and always when I'm asking tough questions. I feel if
   I dropped my $1295 for the unlimited version and I'm prepared to be
   patient for answers, I should at least get some kind of response.
   I've been waiting 3 weeks or so since my last email and still no 
   response.

-- 
----------------
 Paul Bash
 pbash at csn.org