A/UX Release 2.0

[William Roberts]

In article <306 at digigw.lab.digital.co.jp> gday at digigw.lab.digital.co.jp (Gordon Day) writes:
>In article <729 at ncis.tis.llnl.gov>, tjt at lance.tis.llnl.gov (Tim Tessin) writes:
>Perhaps some of you can enlighten me here.  I had made the (obviously mistaken)
>assumption that A/UX was a BSD4.3 derivative.  If this is not so, will I be in
>for a nightmare when I move from SunOS4.0.3 to a Mac running A/UX 2.0?

A/UX 2.0 is still System V at heart, in that it uses inittab
rather than just a single /etc/rc script, you have to think
about using cpio (though tar is available), rsh means
"restricted shell" and not "remote shell". Apart from that it
isn't any more of a nightmare than moving from SunOS to other
non-Sun machines.

>Is the X option available from Apple really just the standard release with yet
>another TWM lookalike?

YOu could compile the standard release if you really wanted to
be sure of what you were getting. MacX is the thing where Apple
have done some work on producing a psuedo-rooted system (i.e.
the root window is not done with X, and the window manager is
provided by the native Mac system).

>What are the mechanics of launching a Finder app from the A/UX side?

Double click it, or type its name to a shell prompt.

>
>How buggy is the current release, and with the new features, what's the guess
>on the next release?

A/UX 1.1.1 is solid though its Mac application support is
fairly limited. We've used it for several months with a student
lab of 100 machines and had very few panics. Some of the
utilities aren't so hot and the C compiler isn't nearly as good
as gcc. As for guesses about A/UX 2.0, guess away...

>I plan on running a number of IIci's with X on A/UX together with Sun 4/80s so
>I would like to mount the A/UX /usr on a Sun server.  Will the A/UX side be
>happy with this?

No problems at all - we did almost exactly this (but with a VAX
11/750) for some while before putting in a IIcx as the server.
We made the change because we were still developing our idea of
what should be on our standard partitions (which are local to
some machines but on NFS for others) and it is much easier to
make a block-for-block image than to wipe a filestore and use
tar or whatever. Our students do use X11 on the machines if
they want to (e.g. for a graphics course or project work) and
two of my colleagues use X as their standard window system on
their IIcxs - this is the Apple X11R3 and works ok, though 8Meg
of memory makes a big difference over our usual 4 Meg
configurations (but then everyong says that about X!).

We still support all of our student files on 3 Sun 3/50s plus
some overflow on a Sequent Balance 21000: this setup creaks a bit and
we will be replacing the Sun 3/50s in time for the next academic year.
-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)