VP/IX

[MARK LEVY]

pu>From: pmartin at ucqais.uc.edu (Paul Martin)
pu>Orga: Univ of Cincinnati, College of Business Admin.


pu>I am interested in possibly running vpix but I am a little bit leary
pu>about laying out a few hundred for this product without seeing it in
pu>use. My point is, would some of you who are running it, tell me how
pu>well it performs?  (i.e. speed, compatablitiy, load on xenix)?
pu>I was really disappointed with windows/386 so I really hate to end up
pu>with another dog.  My configuration is SCO XENIX/386 2.3.2 running
pu>on a 386DX (20mhz) with 4 megs ram, 146 meg hard drive (30meg dos,
pu>16meg dos,  and 100meg xenix partition), VGA card and Display.
pu>Any problems with the above configuration?  Can I use my DOS
pu>partitions directly?

   VP/ix is pretty slick, but it can put a tremendous strain on the 
system's resources.  SCO recomends 2MB + 1MB per concurrent user, over
the minimum memory needed for your other software.  You will find it
to be slow, but not terribly so.  The rest of your system will function
better if you run VP/ix under nice.  I have had some problems with 
my Maxlogic VGA card and VP/ix, in that for some unknown reason, the
VP/ix session comes up in VGA monochrome.  Other than that, no major
problems.  Regarding accessing the DOS partition, you only have read
access.  If you start a VP/ix session as root, you would also have
write access to the DOS partition, and I believe that this is something
that would be _extremely_ dangerous.  You will be able to use "net-
worked" (redirected) drives that VP/ix automaticly brings up on
the XENIX file system.  Be careful that you use the drives which are
based on your home directory if you need to do any DOS piping, since 
tmp files would be written in the "root" (\) directory, and if 
you don't have write permission, the program will appear to hang.

Mark
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