From: jrh@mustang.dell.com (Randy Howard)
Subject: Re: The bad news about Dell Unix (was: SysV)
Organization: Dell Computer Co
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 08:07:18 GMT

peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:

>In article <1410@pacsoft.com> mike@pacsoft.com (Mike Stefanik) writes:
>> Since most DOS folks have been conditioned to think of UNIX as a huge,
>> unmanageable monster, the "Lite" seems like an attempt to allay those fears.

>Boy, are they gonna be upset with NT.

I am always a bit confused about these comments that claim that UNIX machines
are so much more difficult to administer than DOS systems.

A couple comments spring to mind after spending an incredible evening with a 
DOS/Windows machine.  I have NEVER spent as long installing a UNIX system as
I have with this DOS box that I need for a project at work.

All I thought I was going to have to do was install the C/C++ 7.0 compiler,
and then get down to programming.  Not so.  First of all, C7 requires DPMI
services, which means you either have to be running under Windows or run some
special memory manager like 386MAX. (EMM386 won't cut it).  I was a bit 
disappointed the first time I typed 'cl foobar.c' at a regular dos prompt and
it burped and bailed out.  So I install Windows, which wasn't too bad,
but decided since my copy of the WinSDK came with this free 386MAX package
that provided DPMI services, to install that as well.  I did this so that
I could do some code development without windows if I wanted to (like
calling in from my home system).  

It turns out that the 386MAX package has this automated install program that 
rewrites your autoexec.bat and config.sys files a minimum of three times, 
along with reboots in between each pass as it goes.  It attempts to perform
all sorts of magic tests to figure out how to best make use of the upper
memory blocks.  Well, first time around (3rd reboot), it says its done, I type
'win', the screen blanks for a moment, then I get the C:> prompt back again.
To make a long story a bit shorter, I finally discovered that it had decided
(incorrectly) that it knew how to remap my video memory (B000-B800) to another
address to optimize it somehow or another.  After digging through the manuals,
and about 10 iterations of the magical 3-reboot-a-thon, I managed to convince
the software not to mess with that memory range and Windows worked (such as
it does at least) again.  The whole process of installing DOS 5, Windows 3.1, 
C7, SDK, and 386MA took about 6 hours (conservatively) to get working, and I 
still have a minimal system that will do very little besides compile C source.
By the way, this process required about 300 responses to on-screen prompt, plus
a lot of reading of the manual for 386MAX and some creative testing.  Install
of a UNIX SVR4 system that will do far more, requires that I answer probably 10
questions all told, maybe less if I take the default installation option.

The next step took me totally by surprise.  I wanted to install the DDK for
Windows.  I expected to run 'setup' like every other Microsoft product I've
ever seen.  Not so.  It tells me to look on the diskettes until I find a file
with a printout of directory trees for each floppy, then use this to search 
through the diskettes one at a time and manually copy small sets of files into
their proper place.  After a lot of kicking and screaming on my part, I finally
got that installed as well (I think, only time will tell if I did it all in
the correct fashion).

Sorry about being so long-winded, I'll finish up quickly now :)
I suppose if Windows had kicked out a reasonable error message, I might have 
tracked the original problem down sooner.  I don't recall ever having this much
trouble installing a COMPLETE UNIX system, far more powerful than the minimal
system I describe above.  In the time consumed I could have install 10-15 UNIX
workstations, setup user accounts, automatic backup schedules, printers, the
works, and still had time left over for lunch.  Perhaps these UNIX systems
aren't so hard to setup afterall...

-- 
Randy Howard            _o	    @'s: jrh@dell.com
Dell Computer Corp.     \<,	    !'s: ...!uunet!dellunix!jrh
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