some questions

[D.J.Walker-Morgan]

daveh at cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:

>In article <1991Jun13.132128.21224 at micromuse.co.uk> dj at micromuse.co.uk (D. J. Walker-Morgan) writes:
>>cazabon at hercules (Charles Cazabon (186-003-526)) writes:

>>The SVR4 is *NOT* as well put together as other SVR4's, the X11 seems to
>>be based on AT&T's distribution and is X11R3... and for the money you pay
>>for the basic machine here in the UK, you can acquire higher specification
>>NeXTs, Macs, 486's and some SPARC systems. 

>Well, perhaps you should consider that SVrR4 isn't yet available on NeXT, Mac,
>or SPARC.  And most of the UNIX systems currently shipping for PClone are not
>SVr4, though that is available.

Well, I've been living with 386 SVR4's for a while now, from a number of
vendors (AT&T, Intel, UHC, Dell... all commercially availble SVR4's) 
There's nothing an SVr4 user misses under SunOS 4.1.....

>>The A3000UX has to be bought with a ULowell card (the A2024 monitor I don't 
>>regard as an alternative) and monitor.

>Have you actually used an A2024 or Moniterm?  I use them daily, both at home
>and at work.  There's no obvious difference between these and the NeXT display
>in practical use.  If you want high resolution color, I can understand that 
>this doesn't solve you problem, but otherwise, it's a fine display IMHO.

I have no doubt it's a fine display, but I don't buy a fine color computer
like the Amiga, and run a large mono screen on it.

>>That said, it is somehow what I expected to come from Commodore as their
>>Unix box. Previous incarnations of Amix have appeared to be more "matched"
>>to the machine, but that work seems to have been discarded....

>I don't know what that means.  Real early versions, back in the days of AMIX,
>used Rico's window manager.  But that was because there was no graphics 
>standard for SVr3.2, and we intended that the machine do graphics things.  
>It would be foolish to provide a standard OS, SVr4, and require posts to adopt
>some alien graphics standard.  That's the current problem with Apple UNIX --
>Apple wants UNIX ports to use the Mac graphics toolbox rather than any standard
>UNIX display manager.  C= decided to do a modern UNIX.  The difference is, 
>UNIX people might be attracted to UNIX on the A3000.  On the Mac, Mac users
>might get attracted to UNIX, but you're not going to have people who know UNIX
>attracted to AU/X.

Yes, but the supplied X server could make an effort to use the Amiga chippery
rather than work in mono. Like I said, I'm waiting for 2.0 Amiga Unix, because
I hear you guys are working on the server to get it's smarts up a bit. 

I'm a Unix person, born and bred, and I found the A3000UX disappointing. 
I don't like the Mac A/UX much for the reasons you mention, but at least you
don't feel that you are only getting 10% of what the video hardware is
capable of.

BTW, are Commodore looking at adding Motif to the SVR4 as standard... 

>-- 
>Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
>   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
>	"This is my mistake.  Let me make it good." -R.E.M.

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  dj at micromuse.co.uk | "I've seen the future, I can't afford it" - ABC
                     | Voice +44-71-352-7774 Fax +44-71-351-7834