NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/unix/sysv386/13302

Text File | 1992-08-18 | 2.8 KB | 58 lines

Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Path: sparky!uunet!portal!kdenning
From: [e-mail] (Karl Denninger)
Subject: Re: Recommendations wanted on PC Unix system purchase
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: DELL and memory
Organization: VideOcart Inc.
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 17:39:11 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Karl Denninger) writes:
>
>| The package ships with two (or three if you have unlimited users) disks and the
>| two tapes.  You boot the disks; the system prompts you to insert the tape and
>| off you go.  Slick installation, very fast, and much nicer than doing the
>| diskette shuffle.
>
>  Sure wish they'd start shipping on floppy. I can put a card in a
>laptop (usually) to install from network, but I can't in a notebook, and
>Dell without X is a nice notebook system, fast and lean. So I use Xenix.

Yeah, but you'd get 100 floppies!  I already did that a few times (witness
the huge box 'o floppies with ISC 2.2!)

>  Fact: older versions of Dell took 7-8 MB of RAM to install, but would
>run in 4MB if you didn't use X. I suspect that that's true of the new
>release, too. Why do I mention this? Battery life is related to memory
>size and disk usage, and if I don't use a lot of vmem to create
>swapping, I bet I can run longer in 4MB than 8.

It will run in 4MB, but won't LOAD in 4MB.  That is the real problem.  It
will run reasonably well if you reconfigure the kernel to remove the items
you don't use (this got lots easier in the 2.2 release; one command now).

>  Remember, Dell says they want 8MB, only a fool would try something the
>manual says won't work, right?

The problem is that the 8MB is needed for the two RAM disks they use during
the load process.  Otherwise it would probably work.  All this is related to
not leaving an open-for-write root floppy filesystem out there during
install (as one who has trashed ISCs install disks many times, I REALLY
appreciate this; who among us hasn't had misconfigured hardware blow up an
installation process).

>  Maybe they should start shipping V.4 installed on their notebooks, and
>let them figure out how to get it in if you can't load from floppy. Or
>they could provide a driver for those parallel port SCSI adaptors and
>let me run to a tape that way. If a notbook is large enough for a slot,
>even a half slot, they wasted space, I want it smaller!

That's not a bad idea actually.... (parallel SCSI adapter)

--
Karl Denninger         Inet:  [e-mail]
VideOcart Inc.        Voice: [phone]