Quote:>Hi...I've been trying to determine a good Unix to buy for my needs.
>After talking to a few vendors and mail order places my head is now
>throughly spinning.
>First off: Do I need a developers system? All I'm really interested
>in is compiling sources off of the net and some small time C coding
>of my own little utilities, etc. Not interested in developing for
>X or other graphical environments, databases, etc.
>I assume a C compiler is included with all base system Unices?
Nope.
Quote:>If not, there's GCC (which I'd install anyways) but are there libraries
>with it as well?
Not with gcc. Not all Unixes have the libraries included. While you can
replace MOST of the missing library with glibc.a, or bits and pieces from
various sources, there is still the unistd library that handles syscalls,
etc.
Quote:>Basically other than compiling net sources I want NFS(Server/clinet) and
>TCP/IP capabilities which seem to be an extremely expensive add on, atleast
>for SCO. (695+695!!!)
>From what I can gather, there are a few free X window environments on the
>net already, so is there any reason to pay extra for one?
>I'm not interested in running graphic applications, but it would be nice
>to have resizable shell windows with mouse support to move them around,
>cut/paste etc.
Yes, but you will probably build from source code. I have almost
finished building X for our hp9000/300's and 400's running BSD,
and it took about 150 megs to build X, libraries, and MIT provided
clients.
Quote:>Any idea what vendor I should check out? I'd like to spend less than $900
>for base system+TCP+NFS. I'm a student so some place with an edu discount
>might be nice as well.
BSDI - it will sell for $1000 for everything, including networking, X,
full source, the gnu utilities in source / binary form, etc. I've seen
the alpha system, and it was quite stable. Beta tapes are shipping now,
with gamma to follow in June?
Also, before you actually buy anything you might take a look at both
386BSD and Linux, and wait until both are more stable and can be
evaluated better. Both are free, and in some stage of testing.
386BSD is the less mature of the two - but it has networking support,
tape drivers, and the Berkeley FFS, all of which Linux lacks. On the
downside, ptrace() is not implemented, the kernel won't boot in some
systems, it won't coexist with anything else on the same drive,
etc. Also, SCSI support is painfully lacking.
Linux works on most systems, has some degree of FPU emulation
(enough to use hardware floating point with GCC as long as the math
library supplies the transcendental functions, etc), virtual consoles,
shared libraries, and the generic SCSI driver package which makes
adding SCSI support for different host adapters trivial.
SCSI support for atleast CSC, Seagate, and Ultrastor
hosts should make the next release, with Adaptec, DTC, Future Domain,
and probably Always following sometime. People are currently working
on X, VFS is being implemented to allow us to drop in "normal"
filesystems (ie FFS - currently, the Minix file system is used).
I immagine someone will get to networking, sometime soon as
all the other fun projects have been taken.
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