Novice questions about the Unix PC

DoN Nichols dnichols at ceilidh.beartrack.com
Thu Mar 14 01:00:31 AEST 1991


In article <40035 at cup.portal.com> Azog-Thoth at cup.portal.com (William Thomas Daugustine) writes:
>
>This weekend I traded some stuff for a Unix PC, and have many questions
>for those of you kind enough to help me out:-)
>
>First of all, I was told the thing was a 3B1, but all over the box
>its marked 7300. What is the difference, if any?

	If the monitor is mounted to a raised platform in the center of the
top, it is a 3B1.  (The raised section is to clear a full-height hard drive.)
The differences are:
1)	The raised section above with a larger hard drive.
2)	A (possibly) more powerful power supply, with a cable to take power
	directly to the hard drive, rather than routing the power through
	traces on the main board.
3)	The 7300 is more likely to have 512k of ram for an older version, or
	1MB for a newer one.  The 3B1 is more likely to have 2MB of ram.
	(This is on the main cpu board, not counting add-on memory in the
	form of extra ram cards, or combo cards (which have two serial ports
	in addition to the ram)).

>Next, Id like to know where to get some software for this thing.

	Osu-cis.  See the net address given later.  For things in the main
directory, you will also need to have the development system, since they are
in source form for the most part.  for things in STORE, those are
installable binary distributions.  One thing that you want to get from the
STORE is the KSH+IN.Z file, which is a more bug-free version of ksh, and
will save you a bit of hair-pulling, especially if you try to bring up cnews
on the machine.  (If you do, I would suggest that you get one of the mod
kits which allow two hard drives, and 16 tracks rather than the current
limit of 8 tracks per drive).  There will be information files about these
in osu-cis, especially the FAQ file.

>The first thing on my list is to get a screen saver. I have to 
>turn this thing off, cause it takes so damned long to boot!

	It's there!  Just log in as install, go to the "preferences"
section, and there will be a choice for screen-blanking time.  (You really
don't want to be turning off a Unix system frequently - it is better off
being run full time, especially if you have an UPS to run it on.

>Also, this window type interface, can one dump that in favor of
>a real windowing system, like maybe X? (please!)

	Mgr is a possibility, but requires a hardware mod for efficient
access to the video ram.  (There is a loadable driver which was just posted
to comp.sources.3b1 which will do the same thing more slowly.)  If you have
FTP access, go to 'cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu' and get the att7300/README file
and the one for the STORE, also in the same directory.  Print these out, and
make a wish list, then ftp away.  Also, get the FAQ file there.

	[ ... ]

>Thanx

	You're welcome
		DoN.
-- 
Donald Nichols (DoN.)		| Voice (Days):	(703) 664-1585
D&D Data			| Voice (Eves):	(703) 938-4564
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