Amiga 3000UX

[Philip Leverton]

We had an Amiga 3000UX as a demo machine here for a while. It had SysV R4
beta on it (I don't remember which minor beta rev it was). Here are
a few comments that I have on it:

Favourable:

Interfaced with our campus network ok. It was easy to install a default
route and TCP/IP worked fine with it. Someone even logged into our machine
from interstate using a guest account. You might want to check the password
file for such accounts and turn them off or delete them if you are going
to sit the Amiga on a network.

System V did not seem too bad; although I don't use SysV regularly at all.

troff worked well, including converting the output to PostScript with
dpost. (your own personal troffcomputer :-)

Could display X clients on other machines without any problems (the target
machine I used was a DECstation 3100).

I liked the virtual screens feature.

Problems:

Our system only had 5 Mb of memory which meant that using Open Look/olwm
was painful since the system was limited by very frequent disk accesses.
As I think the docs say, 8 or 16 Mb would be much better.

The C shell has a few gliches: putting a job into the background and
then killing it logs you out. Job control in the ksh seemed stable though.
Filename completion in the C shell didn't work correctly; Upon typing
ESC the pathname would be completed on screen but that information did not get
back to the system and it would act like no text was there.

As another poster mentioned, I could't find a way to get Open Look
going in colour.

There were some bugs evident in Fortran at higher optimisations; however a
fairly large nuclear physics program from one of our main machines
compiled and executed properly.

Also I couldn't figure out how to authorise X programs to display on
the Amiga under Open Look. I'm sure I tried looking for obvious things
like xhosts or menu options but had no luck.

Next week we are getting a demo of the machine running multimedia applications
so I'll be able to see how it performs in that arena.

Phil Leverton, Information Technology Services, Univ of Melb, Australia